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[tabbycat]

Having commenced my venture into IL-2 map-making a mere three weeks ago, I'm still very much a novice at the art ... I'm learning rapidly, although the learning curve is very steep!

It occurred to me that it might be of some interest to others, particularly anyone else new to map-making or contemplating starting, if I were to record my progress, setbacks, observations, discoveries, problems - and hopefully, solutions, in a thread here as a sort of diary?

The inspiration and motivation for my map project:
Roll back to the day, about a month ago, when I installed the excellent 352nd Channel map - after a few happy hours flying around southern England, visiting Kenley, Biggin, Tangmere, etc., I headed westward - towards home - dropping in at Boscombe Down, then on  to Filton ... there's the Bristol Channel, looking unusually fresh in the pleasant morning light, but .... oh, bugger, I've flown off the edge of the map and entered that desolate  wilderness of infinite repetition ... infinite repetition ... infinite repetition ...

I really wanted to fly over a familiar landscape, around my home on the Devon/Somerset border and on a historical note, my local airport at Exeter, as RAF Exeter was a very active fighter base, both during and after the Battle of Britain, being at the front line of air defence for the South West of England, however the first operational unit to arrive on site in 1939, was a department of R.A.E Farnborough, known as '02', equipped with Fairey Battles, the Fairey P.4/34, Harrow, Virginia and Wellesley. June 1940 saw the formation of the gunnery Research Unit at Exeter from 'A' Flight Armament Testing Squadron who were employed in experimental flying using a variety of aircraft including Spitfires, Defiants, a Henley, Hurricane and a Gloster F.9/37. During the BoB, RAF Exeter was home to 87, 213 and 601 Squadrons of No 10 Group.

So ... why not make my own map? After all, having trained as a cartographer and been involved with maps throughout my career, including helping to develop a computer-assisted mapping system, making a map for Il-2 shouldn't be too difficult .... should it?

Well, it's certainly not a walk in the park, however despite being, at times, incredibly frustrating, Il-2 map-building is absorbing and should be do-able by anyone with the ability to read and follow instructions, although a little interpretation is sometimes required, as well as the determination to work through the frustrations - the satisfaction from the small achievements as each problem is solved is well worth the effort - but beware, it's an addictive passtime

Important lessons learned so far:
1. Before starting, spend some time on research - read every scrap of info you can find - especially the excellent tuorials by Kevin P & Boomer (many thanks, guys).
2. Make notes as you go - if something works, having notes will enable you to repeat it in future - or avoid making the same mistakes twice.
3. Test and experiment - don't treat as absolute everything you've read elsewhere - there may occasionally have been errors made in translations or false assumptions made.
4. Make backup copies of all your development files at frequent intervals so that you can easily revert to a working version if something goes wrong.

Anyhow, if anyone is interested in reading my ramblings ... and the moderators are OK with it, then I'll continue to update this thread as I go along and perhaps others can chip in with helpful suggestions if (or rather, when!) I run into problems.

Cheers

Terry

[tabbycat]

Thanks, Kiwi
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Having downloaded all the necessary map-building tools (for links to download map tools, see Boomer's post here: https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,10282.0.html), I set about working my way through KevinP's PDF tutorial. I decided that rather than work through the Manam example, I would jump right in and grab the elevation data for the area I wanted to cover. In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest decision, but more on that later.

A couple of tips on using the interface at: http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/SELECTION/inputCoord.asp to get elevation data:
1. If you select your area by clicking the grid squares on the displayed world map, you need to click on the bottom edge of the square - if you click in the centre of the square, it will select the square above the one you want.
2. You can also select the area by entering the max & min geographic coordinates (turn on the grid in Google Earth to find them) - just remember that when using decimal degrees, longitudes WEST of the Greenwich Meridian should be entered as negative values. This method will however, simply provide data-sets from the relevent grid squares.

So ... I downloaded 4 squares of data, covering an area from, roughly the 0° meridian on the eastern edge, to the west coast of Ireland and from the Solway Firth in the north, to Bordeaux on the southern edge. Then came the first major hurdle - the version of Microdem that I downloaded doesn't have the menu options for merging the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tiles as outlined in KevinP's tutorial. There followed two evenings of head-scratching and working my way through various menu options before I found the solution and to save anyone else who has a recent version of Microdem from wasting time, here it is:

1. Unzip your srtm _xx_xx.zip files to a common folder, allowing the readme.txt file to overwrite each time (they're all the same) - you can also dispense with the .hdr and .tfw files as they're not needed - the only files required are the .tif
2. From the Microdem menu, File > Open > Open and merge DEMs
3. In the dialogue box, navigate to the folder containing your unzipped srtm files, then Ctrl+click each of the .tif files you want to merge, then click 'Open'
4. Sit back and wait a couple of minutes while Microdem does its stuff

The above works for Microdem 16.0, build 2012.2.22.1

I could however, have saved myself a lot of time (and kept more hair) if I'd found this thread sooner: https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,10282.msg205467.html#msg205467 where TedStryker had already posted the solution.

OK, so I now had my merged DEM and proceeded to crop it to what I thought would be a good area to cover, i.e. North-South, from  Gloucester to Saint-Nazaire and East-West, from Le Havre to the Scilly Isles. The next few steps went quite smoothly and following KevinP's tutorial, by the end of the third evening, I was ready to try loading my map into the (unlocked) FMB, using a modified load.ini that I'd grabbed from elsewhere. Surprise, surprise - the first attempt failed, however correcting a typo in the load.ini sorted that out and to my great satisfaction, the second attempt loaded

Another tip here - for a first try at map-building, to keep things simple, use just one land texture in map_T, i.e. bucket-fill the land with RGB 0 and the sea with RGB 31, then in your load.ini, under the [FIELDS] section, point LowLand0 at a simple stock texture, e.g." LowLand0 = land/summer/sk_fields_airfieldGr.tga,4 " and ensure that you have "Water3 = water/Beach.tga" - doing this will reduce the chance of errors at this stage - other textures can be built up subsequently as you progress.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To be continued ....

[tabbycat]

I said yesterday that I'd return to the point about my not working through the Manam example in KevinP's tutorial - the reason being that I have an aversion to Manam - strange, but true ... it stems from my days in cartographic training school when one of the exercises involved tracing the contours on Manam island with a mapping pen - and Manam has a lot of contours! To me, the name Manam recalls many hours of mind-numbing tedium. For anyone not familiar with a mapping pen, this, before the days of Rotring and the like, was an instrument of torture that, in order to perform smoothly, required sharpening and polishing on an oil-stone, careful adjustment of a screw so as to produce a constant 4 thousandth of an inch line thickness and loading with ink from a dropper ..... I do wonder why Kevin chose Manam - perhaps he went through the same training school?

Anyhow, having eschewed the advice, I guess I was fortunate in that my map loaded at the second attempt However, it was only after loading it and fiddling with it here and there, that I understood the full scope of what I was attempting and realised that I was, perhaps being just a little over-ambitious. Had I followed through the example, I would probably have realised sooner - time for a re-think.

I decided to restart from scratch and to reduce the area of coverage to a more manageable size, concentrating on my main area of interest - an area approximately 40 x 55 miles (65 x 90 km), covering East Devon and West Somerset. By this time, I'd become quite familiar with Kevin's PDF tutorial and, good though it is, scrolling through it was becoming tiresome, but I still needed to refer to it; so I made a Word document of all the salient points as a bullet point check-list, which I could keep on screen as I worked - a half-hour well spent

Here I was, about a week into my project (around 20+ hours of evening work) and at a point where I had a workable basis of a map to build on - next job, tidy up the odd jaggedy humps on the coastline and make a start on bringing the landscape to life with rivers and textures.

In Kevin's "Textures for beginners", on page 46, he explains how to make map_t using Microdem, although in the opening paragraph, he says:

With this method you can apply textures to your map in layers according to height. It's not a method I use because I don't like the results, (I think it makes the map look like a layer cake) ....

I think he's probably right - but only for certain types of landscape, particularly mountain regions. The highest  elevation on my map however, is only about 350 metres and the landscape comprises broadly three distinct types, i.e. a large expanse of low-lying (under 10m), sparsely populated, arable, coastal plain and wetland, known as the Somerset Levels, .... a 'middle-ground', that is mostly rural, agricultural land and thirdly, the upland areas (over 300m) of Exmoor and the edge of Dartmoor, which consist of rolling, heather-covered scrub moorland. This being the case, I decided to give the "map_T from Microdem" method a try - and I'm pleased with the result - IMO, for this type of landscape, the method works well for getting an initial lay-down of textures - breaking up the pattern effect and adding more interest can come later.

Well, that was two weeks ago - most of my time since has been spent experimenting with texture effects taken from Google Earth screen grabs and yesterday evening I started exploring the Alpha-layer technique for tile blending ... without success so far ... more head scratching, but I'll get there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To be continued .... 

[Avala]

I said yesterday that I'd return to the point about my not working through the Manam example in KevinP's tutorial - the reason being that I have an aversion to Manam - strange, but true ... it stems from my days in cartographic training school when one of the exercises involved tracing the contours on Manam island with a mapping pen - and Manam has a lot of contours! To me, the name Manam recalls many hours of mind-numbing tedium. For anyone not familiar with a mapping pen, this, before the days of Rotring and the like, was an instrument of torture that, in order to perform smoothly, required sharpening and polishing on an oil-stone, careful adjustment of a screw so as to produce a constant 4 thousandth of an inch line thickness and loading with ink from a dropper ..... I do wonder why Kevin chose Manam - perhaps he went through the same training school?

Old school 

Actually, in my experience there is no need for alpha blending with the textures, the game does that pretty nice itself. Plus textures with alpha blending could make problems.

Be careful with Watchmaker's curves for making height map. Or use it as a base, because it gives too round and flat terrain (my opinion again) Some experimenting with the light level and sharpening/ blurring can provide better results. Of course it can be fixed later till some degree with land light. Also, I think that it is best to do 100% scale map or slightly bigger (lets say 10-20%) because you can have good heights in that way, anyway I do think that default IL2 are smaller than 100% scale (or the game doesn't do it good).

[tabbycat]

Well, another few hours over the weekend spent struggling with texture blends - I'd already cracked the "four-square offset" method a week or so ago, but on the principle that it's good to have a range of weapons in the armoury, I felt it would be worth learning the "Alpha-layer blend" technique. It may well be that one method may work better with certain types of landscape than the other, but I felt that I needed to learn how to apply both methods to understand the effects.

Actually, in my experience there is no need for alpha blending with the textures, the game does that pretty nice itself.

That's the conclusion that I reached after all the time spent getting it to work - when I loaded the Alpha-blend texture tile into the FMB, I couldn't detect any visual difference in the blending with neighbouring textures - as you say, the game's internals do a very good job. Alpha-layer blending also has the significant drawback that textures with Alpha layers cannot be colour-indexed; so file sizes will be unnecessarily larger. Also, where the Alpha-blend textures abutted themslves, there was a noticable edge; so they would still require something like the 4-square offset technique.

I've found that for textures such as moorland, with no definite shapes, that a quick and dirty method of achieving an effective blend is to use GIMP's 'make seamless' filter. With the image in RGB mode, goto Filters > Map > Make Seamless, then goto Edit > Fade Make Seamless - try out the various layer-blend modes and perhaps reduce opacity a little to taste.

The above method however, doesn't work so well where there are lines like field boundaries or roads. For this type of tile content, I'm getting better results using Layer > Transform > Offset > Offset by x/2, y/2 ... then blending the meeting edges of the four squares thus produced using the clone tool.

A note here about the GIMP - I've had several years' experience of using Photoshop (CS3) for photo-editing; so I was a little reluctant at first to learn another image manipulation programme, however it would seem that not all TARGA (TGA) formats are equal, i.e. IL-2 doesn't recognise TGA output from Photoshop, whereas it does from GIMP - strange, I would have thought TGA should be a standard, but it seems not to be the case. Thus, I was forced into using the GIMP ... and I must say that I've been pleasantly surprised, both by its ease of use and its power, although the ease of use may be due to my familiarity with the various tools, which are mostly similar to Photoshop's - the biggest difference being the interface and the hardest thing was learning where the tools I wanted to use are located. That said, I still prefer to use Photoshop where possible - I find the clone tool works more smoothly in PS and the Patch tool makes merging the edges of the 4-square offset a breeze. Another benefit is the Colour Match feature in PS, which makes consistencey of colour a doddle.


PS also has the big advantage of a macro recording facility - 'Actions' - which alleviates the tedium of repetetive tasks. On the other hand, for anything requiring Alpha layers, the GIMP is streets ahead of PS; so it's swings and roundabouts - the upshot being that my workflow for producing texture tiles, starting with a Google Earth screen capture, goes first to PS to do the main work, save as TGA, then re-open in GIMP and save again (in Indexed colour mode) for use in IL-2.

Be careful with Watchmaker's curves for making height map. Or use it as a base, because it gives too round and flat terrain (my opinion again) Some experimenting with the light level and sharpening/ blurring can provide better results. Of course it can be fixed later till some degree with land light. Also, I think that it is best to do 100% scale map or slightly bigger (lets say 10-20%) because you can have good heights in that way, anyway I do think that default IL2 are smaller than 100% scale (or the game doesn't do it good).

Very interesting - I'll bear that in mind - many thanks

Terry

[Chrival]

Hi Tabbycat!
Many thanks for this thread.
I plan to make some new maps soon so your advices are precious.

ButI don't think I'd be able to manage to load a new map at the second attempt like you did ! 

[tabbycat]

Hi Chrival, I'm pleased you're enjoying this thread When you get around to having a go at making a map yourself, if you want to discuss anything, feel free to PM me.
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I've not made much progress on my map over the past few days, other than solving an issue I had with rail tracks and their underlying textures (see my posts in this thread) - apart from that, I decided to take a break and put the map on pause while I had a play around with installing the 4.11 patch (onto a clean, un-modded copy of 4.101). I've also been speccing-up a new PC build as my current rig is around 5 years old and beginning to show its age. I have however, upgraded Google Earth to the Pro version; so with its ability to save screen-shots at much higher resolutions, I intend to pick up the map again tomorrow and produce some higher quality texture tiles.

More soon ........