1.Open up Terragen. Create a Terrain to your liking using "Generate Terrain" and "View/Sculpt". Maximize the Landscape View/Sculpt window using the plus sign at the top left. Set the map to grayscaly using the settings (Greys.. Cols)at the top right hand side of the window. [Do not decrease anthing to the point where water is showing, water will be added later.] Press PrintScreen on the keyboard.
2.Open up GIMP, photoshop, mspaint, or whatever image editing software you use. I would ussually use GIMP but for the sake of the majority i will use paint in this tutorial: Cut out the area below marked in red. Copy it. Go to file>new. Click No when it asks you to save.
3.Paste the object..If the canvas is showing you may need to resize the canvas. (i.e. if you see white around the edges). What you have should look like this (without the red). Save this file as *yourmapname.bmp* . Remember where you save this. IT MUST BE .BMP!
4.Now we're ready to start converting this image into actual geometry for our map : ) Open up gtkradiant (get version 1.4...it's way better than 1.5 IMO. It comes with GtkGensurf which is the plugin we'll be using so..if you dont have it get it.) GtkGensurf is a program that makes terrain, it has many options, one of which is by reading a height map. This is the one that we're going to use. The Radiant engine understands your image like this. [Totally white = Highest Totally Black= lowest Grey=somewhere in between] Anyways...Go to Plugins >gtkgensurf>Ground Surface...This just tells radiant that you want this file to be the ground and not say one of the walls.
5. On the General tab select "from bitmap". Click on the Bitmap tab. Click on the browse button and find the map you made. Below the filename is two options Map Color 0 to.... and Map Color 255 to... the first means that the blackest of black parts are "how ever much you put" in altitude and the second means that the whitest of white parts are "how ever much you put" in altitude. I recomend 0 in the first one. For now lets put 1000 in the second one.
6. Now to tell radiant how much space this thing is going to cover. Go to the extents tab. The only two sections we'll worry about are Extents and Divisions
[Extents] This tells radiant where the four corners of this terrain you're making are. It needs to know how big this thing really is. For now lets put in values as their seen below.
[Divisions] The terrain that is to be created will be divided into as many polygons as you decide in this box. Many divisions will cause more realistic terrains but hurt compile time and FPS. I reccommend 20-25 in both x and y (same value in both). We'll use the values below.
7. Allright we're almost done. Go to the textures tab type the path to any JKA texture you want. If you want to do what i did its textures/desert/sandfloor2. Don't worry about steep.
8. Allright press OK...there it is.. Now put a box right tight around it...preferably a sky box....put some lights a player and compile it...
That should do it if you have any questions and/or comments contact me at: tolken_amnar@hotmail.com
