Spring RTS Engine

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C2H1AOU0


Trying to make maps for Conflict Terra in the style of the map i have linked to above. It's basically a topography map with colors on each layer. The problem is larger you go the uglier and more unwieldy the process becomes. The two ways I've tried to do it is:

A: Take the heightmap blow it up, then poster-edges/cartoon the map. Then magic wand each area and bucket fill it. This kind of leaves waves of gray in the final texture.

B: Take the heightmap blow it up, then posterize then poster-edges/cartoon and bucket fill the areas. This does not produce the gray zones but i get weird artifacts in my topo lines.

So anyone has suggestions on how I could actually get what i want. Just give me some advice.

I don't actually understand the problem you are pointing at. To me, the map seems really good in the sense of that your mod is endeavouring into. (this minimalistic and "cartoonistic" style)

Perhaps you could provide us some screenshots pointing out the problem of yours. Providing a "test" map isn't really helping in this case. You need to clarify the problem a bit more.

http://a.imageshack.us/img835/7721/47749694.png THIS IS A TEXTURE OF A 32X32 MAP

Yeah the small small maps work well but I need to be able to make them on a large scale. Strange things start to happen when i scale up much past 8x8. Above is a texture map for a 32x32 map. As you can see in the
central island there are weird little black artifacts around my otherwise fairly clean black line. Also you will see there are rings of the gray height map bleeding through the texture map around the dark brown islands. The more i scale the more problems i seem to have.

I see. What image editor software you are using? What resampling method you use when resizing/scaling up?

Quick evaluation: those grayscale layers showing up after scale could be because you havent actually filled up (painted) every of those particular shades of gray after selecting the areas with magic wand. Hence, when image is "stretched" or "scaled" the grays stretches along.

I'm using gimp, though Sanada uses Photoshop and has gotten similar results. I'm not sure what you mean by re-sampling but, when I resize, I just go to Image, then Scale Image in the drop down and then scale it up to texture map size.

oksnoop2 wrote:I'm using gimp, though Sanada uses Photoshop and has gotten similar results. I'm not sure what you mean by re-sampling but, when I resize, I just go to Image, then Scale Image in the drop down and then scale it up to texture map size.

Cant remember if gimp has different resampling methods, but in photoshop you have some which each give different results in quality depending on which kind of image you are resizing.

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototip ... oshop.html

You could try Nearest Neighbour and Bicupic Sharper methods to achieve sharp edges...

I really think however, that the main problem lies in the way you are selecting and bucketfilling the layers of grayscale. You need to be sure that you select every shade of gray...

Would blurring the image after rescaling help?

JohannesH wrote:Would blurring the image after rescaling help?

It wont fix the errors. It just makes it a mess. And I assume oksnoop wants to have sharp comics style lines.

SirArtturi wrote:

oksnoop2 wrote:I'm using gimp, though Sanada uses Photoshop and has gotten similar results. I'm not sure what you mean by re-sampling but, when I resize, I just go to Image, then Scale Image in the drop down and then scale it up to texture map size.

Cant remember if gimp has different resampling methods, but in photoshop you have some which each give different results in quality depending on which kind of image you are resizing.

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototip ... oshop.html

You could try Nearest Neighbour and Bicupic Sharper methods to achieve sharp edges...

I really think however, that the main problem lies in the way you are selecting and bucketfilling the layers of grayscale. You need to be sure that you select every shade of gray...

Should start off by saying I'm no kind of Photoshop wizard.

Would using Color Range be like what you're talking about? It sounds like you're just saying to be more tedious in our process.

SanadaUjiosan wrote: Would using Color Range be like what you're talking about? It sounds like you're just saying to be more tedious in our process.

Yea color range pipet actually work better than magic wand in this case. Im not sure what you mean by tedious, but I say you need to be more precise.

If trying these solutions wont fix it, you could try uploading it and I could take a look into it, if the psd file isnt too big.

Gaussian blur before the posterising does help, now that I looked at that huge pic. Then you'll get rid of the black boxes on the green areas, and other such artifacts. It won't turn it into a mess, just try it... Any tiny detail that might also drown in it doesn't matter, if youre gonna posterisate it anyway, the sharpening that happens with Gimps default resizing method doesn't go well with posterising most of the time.

And make sure that when you have full black set in the cartoon filters settings

And when you use magic wand/color range, antialiasing should be off.

median filter is good for removing such stray pixel artefacts.
see the example pictures: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangordnungsfilter

another way that might work to make cartoon texture could be:
take greyscale heightmap
reduce colors to 4 or 5
use median filter vs stray pixels
use paintbucket

haha i be using ms paint
if you want black outlines you can do "find edges" on a second layer and then lay that over the colored heightmap.

I never realized there are so many ways to solve a problem.. but i think wartender found a way that works pretty well. First make a gradient, then
open up the heightmap
scale it
apply gaussian blur with a pretty large radius (i used 20) a few times
make sure the image is in RGB
colors->map->gradient map
color select tool, select a color
select->border
i'd use width= 2 pixels
fill with bucket
repeat the last three steps until done

then woo, ct style map!

thanks for your help people.

i feel useful :3

World machine can be used very well for making heightmaps out of bucked filled paint images. It can remove empty pixels with an expand or a blur node.

springmapeditor is an easy solution.
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=16341
it has a "auto texture whole map" option and it places textures based on slope and height. how it does that can also be definend in textfile profiles but i did not try that yet.
you can replace the sand,rock etc. textures with colored textures and the results looks pretty good (sometimes)

advantage are good preview and and not having to deal with over 9000x9000 pixel large images.

KaiserJ showed me how to edit the files for SME but I could never get rid of the blending completely. I'm actually quite happy with the current method.