Hi! This tool will let you sculpt your terrain in 3D. It even has a template mask for the mapping contest.


I made this tool for the ace of spades, but it should work fine with RWR. I changed the water level to 20,20,20 rgb, and made the template size 2048x2048.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1660874/game/heightmap2.0.zip

You need Blender 3D to run the template file:
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Install Blender
Unzip my heightmap template where ever you like.
Double click on the heightmap2.blend file to run it in Blender.

Open the tutorial.PNG file in your favorite image browser, web browser, or whatever.
Here is a link to make is easy on you:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1660874/game/tutorial.jpg
In a nutshell

You can paint on the blue plane. at any time. I suggest adding some height to the brush, with the height slider, and laying out where your buildings will go first, then go and paint in your hills and mountains and beach heads.

To see the layout for the mapping contest, put a check in the textured solids check-box to briefly see where the boundaries are. You will need to remove the check-mark to see the shading on the terrain again. (right hand side of the 3d window, see #1 in the tutorial.png file for more details.)

When you are done, or just want to preview the heightmap, press F-12, and the black box on the right will turn into your heightmap. If you like it HOVER YOUR MOUSE over the heightmap window and press F3 to save it. If the mouse is not over the heightmap when you press f3 nothing will happen, so make sure your mouse is over the heightmap.

Refer to the tutorial.png file for more help.

Brushes change the shape of the hills, be sure to experiment with them to get maximum control over your sculpting.
Here is a hot-key list, for when you get elite with the tool.


Have fun, I hope you find this useful.

UPDATED:
Removed the obnoxious camera from view-port center.
Closed some un-needed menus so new people do not get scared from all the buttons.

http://www.ace-spades.com/

This?

yes, I was going by the name JoJoe back then.

wow this is very nice!

I'd like to mention that this "tool" is pretty easy to use and don't be scared by all the buttons in your blender window since 99% are not needed anyway!

as an addition:
- with mousewheel up/down you zoom in and out
- if you want the focused viewport to be scaled up to the whole screen (to see more), just press "ctrl+uparrow" and again to go to the previous view.

Thanks and very good job!

Thank you very much for this tool.

Hi, You are very welcome. It is an honor

If I get a sticky thread, i promise to develope this more
I think i can limit the mountain size with a shape-key, so they flatten out if they are over #fff grey-scale value.
I might be able to make a shaded material with GLSL too, so we can see shadows with a layout texture.
I might be able to hack together a python script to load a template texture with a button in the view-port. Then I can collapse the material pallets for more viewport space. (for the unfortunate people stuck in 4:3 aspect ratio.)

Don't forget mouse button 3 to rotate the 3d view-port. I can not enable it for the laptop hack, you guys need to do it, then you press both mouse buttons + control. You also can use the Num-pad arrows to rotate left, right. up, down, and snap to front, side and top.

Here is the list from inside the blender file.





You are welcome, hope you can sculpt some cool places for us to play in

Just updated the file!

Be sure to get this version!
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1660874/game/heightmap2.0.zip

The scale of the mapping contest template was totally off. I packed the wrong image.

Sorry about that.

In the process of fixing the file I stumbled upon a way I can paint the grass and other terrain textures onto the 3d terrain. There might be a texture version soon, and an image importer for your existing height maps.

Happy with my height map made with this, great tool btw.

But could anyone make a bit of a tutorial for how to finish things in Inkscape? I know there is one in the PvP map sticky, but it doesn't seem to apply to making a map from scratch, thanks guys.

EDIT: I think I've probably figured it out, one question, can I/should I just copy and paste the objects from the objects file in an existing map?

I ran into a problem running my map with a heightmap made with this editor.

I got an OGRE error saying that my heightmap wasnt in greyscale.. Just wondering what to do about that.

I'm not familiar with the editor, but maybe there's a way to control in which color mode it or blender exports the heightmap? If not, one option is to open the heightmap in gimp or similar and change the color format to 8-bit greyscale and save it.