Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

Remade Guadalcanal some time ago for our campaign project to give it a desert look. Changed all ground textures, painted some road tracks, changed dozens of unfitting objects and added a bunch of custom textures (see bunkers), sky was changed to El Alamein sky (custom fog settings), edited water to make it appear more transparent in shallow water (as seen in picture 2 and the very right on pic 1, I love the depth effect this gives to the sea, making it less of a simple water plane). Also switched German to GermanDesert and American to British. Gameplay itself is unchanged, all objects are in same positions, vehicles are the equivalents of the specific armies (was irrelevant, as we change that for every battle...)





Also remade Gazala transforming it into a temperate/winter version, but only have one screenie atm. That one took many hours to complete (lost track somewhere around ~14 workhours) as I had to switch out almost all objects (africa-buildings look somewhat odd in the middle of a temperate winter), carefully position them to not alter gameplay too much and often also had to redo terrain so the new buildings and objects blend in. Also added hundreds of trees to the map (especially in the valleys) to make it look more lively. Again I "froze" many textures (including leaf textures...man, these are a mess) to make them appear more "winterish". Was also more work as BF42 "vanilla" has no real winter set. I changed everything: sandbagwalls, buildings, trees, vehicles, even up to warm winter cloth for the soldiers.



I really love texture painting with Ed42...so damn powerful...both maps were textured with exactly one texture template. Of course this one had many many sublayers, but ultimately they are all combined into one layer considering multiple height and slope settings. This way a consistent look is guaranteed without the lack for detail. Obviously, "manmade" features as roads etc. were painted seperatly by hand.

_________________
Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

Wow, those look exceptional. Great work

_________________

nice...my favorite part of map editing is definitely texturing with ed42. Looks good man!! Very good!

Whats your technique for making roads? By the time I get to them, I'm tired and just want to release the map, lol.


Here's the last map I made...a bastard child of wake island and guadal canal:

Wow, that Gazala looks sexy. Always loved winter maps myself.

It's a shame the download link is invisible.

_________________

There is atm no download link because I didn't upload it as I wasn't sure you liked it. They weigh 40MB (Guadal) and 90MB (Gazala) in uncompressed rfa.

Will do it later, have to go to university now..

Thanks for nice answers, really motivates to continue that kind of work .

I paint roads oldschool with the road tool in Ed42 (mainly). Basic texture with a regular noise or whatever layer, then add a stripe layer with a very low stripe count (2-5) so it looks like vehicle tracks. Decrease opacity to ~30% and then apply with road tool. Quite time consuming, but gives a good look. On Guadal I'm not all happy with my roads as they mainly are the road tracks without a base layer. Looks fine most of the time, but is a bit weird if they run over grass patches, considering the thin grass on my map would be the first to be crushed on vehicle roads...But it was my first map texturing and I refined roadmaking since then...
How do you do yours? They look also very good as far as I can see from your pic.

For difficult parts like intersections etc. I just use Photoshop.

A good 3D effect is gained by changing the Sun and Ambient settings before painting, in my opinion. Set Ambient Light to 0,20 and Sun to 0,80 enhances the influence of the sun vastly instead of giving the Vanillastyle "Omnilight" appearance where terrain shadows are only barely visible. With these settings there are good distinctions between shadow and sun parts, especially noticeable in Guadal pic 1 and 3. Very easy to do, but enhances the look by a great deal. Also supports the terrain shadow generation later, though that's not so obvious on maps where the sun is very high on the sky.

EDIT: Some more Gazala Winter impressions

_________________
Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

DL Guadalcanal Desert
http://www.filefront.com/13951733/guada ... esert.rar/

Added some impressions of gazala winter in the previous posts

_________________
Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

Very nice stuff.