Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

Any battlecraft experts that could help??

I'm to the point where I'm generating shadows for a new map I'm working on. I used Editor42 for the texturing, and I couldn't be happier...I can easily see how you can make EA/dice looking maps with this thing.

Anyways, I go to generate terrain shadows (which generates object shadows as well), and SOME sections are generated with the nice texture, and some with the god-awful battlecraft texture (generated from the material map).

Example:


Any ideas?

You can get excelent much more customizable textures with battlecraft than editor42. At least I believe. It just takes awhile, you have to use the Paint Palette to paint those tire tracks, and those little sand details. It takes some time. But having the Paint Palette for me, is much better, and more customizable than Editor42.

What you do, is you should generate the terrain shadows in battlecraft. And then spend some time with the paint palette. Repainting, and re-texturing what battlecraft has generated.

There is one other way you might like to try:

What you do is generate two versions of the map. One from battlecraft, the other from Editor42. Extract both .rfas fully to different locations. First import the Battlecraft one, with its shadows and all. And load its textures into photoshop. Next take editor42's, and rename its textures something different. And load them into Photoshop. They cut and paste the editor 42 ones over the top of the Battlecraft ones, and use something like "Overlay" or "Hard Light" to blend the two together. Or perhaps cut out the shadows battlecraft generated, paste them onto the editor42 one, and soften the edges. After that save the textures to their right names, repack the level, and see how it looks in-game.

"Archimonde0_0" nice thinking with the photoshop thing, as using the overlaying the two together, should come out with the best quality terrain/texture, but there is the down side it could look utter shit, but you wuldnt find out till its tested,


------ i can't render shadows on my desktop as it has a shit graphics card and just crashes on doing so, my laptop is vista high spec but is not compatible with battlecraft, lol, so i cont win ------

so really i cant help to much as i cant do shadow rendering my self but yh nice thinking archimonde0_0

_________________

_______________

I just wanted to point out one other thing. It seems like Editor 42 has already generated the shadows. Look at the 2 trees in the right foreground

One square at the time my friend, one at a time.
Two #%"#&"#& your rendering.

_________________
In the beginning everybody was a SSM NooB.
BFV SSM on server 66.55.142.243
Server Homepage

Not a bad idea with PS and trying to steal the shadows from there. Before they're merged by battlecraft, are the shadows saved as an "overlay"? If so, that would be perfect and not too hard to do in PS.

Urglub, I'm pretty sure I tried only one square at a time to see what happened...and battlecraft still replaced some textures (I think). I could try it again.

Arch, Editor42 is AMAZING at texturing. No painting required. Now that I have done it once, I could probably texture another pacific map entirely in about five-ten minutes.

You don't paint with editor 42, but have different filters I guess you could call them? I had a height selector, a child of that a noise selector and another height selector. What did I get out of that? After it was 'calibrated' so to speak to my liking, I had a wet sand texture that extended 2 units EXACTLY above waterline, a dry sand above that which blended with grass, and the grass on the rest of the map had some patches of dry sand to break it up. After I had all those settings, all I did was click one button: Texture entire map with selected brush. Map done!

To each his own I guess.

For me Battlecraft is a far easier program to use, probably because I use it so much. I've used Editor 42 to texture a few maps, and it is a very good program that can give you all the splender of DICE maps. But I find battlecraft fun, especially after finishing the map, and generating shadows, because the Paint Pallete allows me to do all sorts of stuff.

I can not only select from the surface map textures to overlay the existing one with. I can pick the brushes strength, size, and even choose a custom color. Like Red, blue, or yellow to do texturing. Red is especially nice for deserts, where you can do a large, but weak brush lightly over the map. And then edit the Sun settings and make the Diffuse color a darker red, getting some great looking deserts. It also works good for theme maps. Like one time I was doing a "silent hill" map, where I had low view distance, and painted the ground, a pale grey, to represent the ashes accumulating on the ground.

For Me Editor 42 was more a single option type thing, where you could choose from a variety of themes, edit the settings a bit, and viola!

GRR! I just tried generating shadows one square at a time (on the fastest setting), and then merging lightmaps...and it gave me BC's shitty textures again!

I'll fiddle with this later. Need to take a break, lol.