First, you need a TA palette file. This is a file containing the 256 colors that TA uses for all its maps. To create this file, start up a game of TA and do a screen capture of it (CTRL+F9) once a game has started. Now exit out of the game and open your photo editor program and load the captured PCX file you just made from TA's SCREENSHOTS folder. Go to the palette menu and save the photo's palette information to a file. The palette should have these colors:
You'll need this palette file later in step 13.
Now open Bryce and set your viewing area to a resolution of 600 x 600 so you'll be able to see the entire map on your screen. Turn off any Anti-Aliasing and True Ambience settings that may be on so that your computer won't take all week to render a map. Also turn off any Gamma Correction that may be on so that your maps don't come out faded.
Use the Sky Lab to clear all your environment settings by turning off your "Sun & Moon", "Cloud Cover", and "Atmosphere" settings since you won't be rendering them. NOTE: Leave your Sun Light left on though so you can see your terrain. Then set your sun to 225° azimuth with an altitude of 60° from the horizon. Also turn off the "Link Sun to View" option. This helps match your map's shading with the many Cavedog shaded features you'll be placing on your cool 3D maps. Be sure to have your shadows setting turned off, though. Otherwise, TA units and features will look funny when they are on a map over a shadow and they're not at all darkened like their surroundings are.
Switch your view from the "Director" to the "Camera" object and remove any terrain and/or ground planes that are already on your viewing screen. Now create a new terrain using the dimensions: X=79.50, Y=5, Z=88.85 (X goes east/west, Y is the height, and Z is going north/south).
NOTE: Be sure your horizon plane is see-through so you can see all the terrain below it.
The next step is to set up your camera's viewing angle. Basically, the camera needs to be aimed downward at your terrain using an angle of 63.44°. This is so that your map gets rendered at the same viewing angle that TA's fixed camera uses to render its 3D units. Annihilator also uses this viewing angle for height map overlays. The camera's field-of-view should be set to 1° to help remove any perspective from the rendered terrain. X = .18 moves the camera just a hair to the right. Y = 5090 moves the camera up very high above the map. And Z = -2546 moves the camera backwards in a southern direction. The camera is then rotated 63.44° downward so that it's aiming at the same viewing angle that TA's in-game screen uses.
So why use the 1° field-of-view? This is to make the map's vertical grid lines as parallel as possible. We don't want any vanishing points adding any perspective to our rendered image. In other words, since TA uses a square screen to view a map, your map has to be square as well. Note the straight vertical lines created by the 1° field-of-view from the rendering camera as shown in the picture below. This format works great when importing to Annihilator.
This will be your camera view for rendering all your 8 x 8 sized TA maps.
Now it's time for the fun part, which is deciding what kind of map to make. How about an ice/water map with lots of islands? If you can get through this part, you'll be able to do most any kind of map. Choose an icy texture for your terrain and head on over to your terrain's editor. NOTE: Be sure you have the texture's bump map turned off.
Let's initialize the terrain size to a resolution of 1024 x 1024 so it won't look like Lego blocks when we render it. We'll use a preview setting of 512 x 512 so it'll be easy to paint on. Now use the NEW button from the Elevation tab in the Editing Tools window to wipe the terrain clean so that it is completely flat (all black). Annihilator will see each black pixel as a terrain elevation of 0 and see each white pixel as a terrain elevation of 255.
NOTE: Be sure to use black pixels somewhere in your terrain. This is because when Annihilator imports your terrain's height map, it re-assigns the darkest pixel it finds in the height map to a value of 0 because Annihilator starts counting up from 0. This is bad news if the lowest part of your terrain has an elevation value higher than 0. It means Annihilator will make the height map lower than your terrain actually is.
To make hills, you can either paint them or have the computer generate them randomly. The more white that gets laid down, the higher your hills will be. Painting your hills darker will reduce their height. Painting very dark areas onto the tops of hills will form volcanic or crater terrain. Feel free to experiment with all kinds of landscaping ideas you'll have. Just remember to leave a black area on your Terrain Canvas so that Annihilator will know where the lowest elevation (level 0) is so it can align the height map properly. Black can be used for defining either a valley's lowest level on a land map, or an ocean's lowest level on a water map.
Using this 512 x 512 preview of a 256 grayscale height map...
...the icy terrain below was rendered. The 24-bit color 600 x 600 image, which took about 20 seconds to render, was used to preview our work so far.
Don't worry about any blue background showing up on the right and bottom edges of your terrain. Annihilator will chop that part off anyway.
Now add water by creating a water plane. Feel free to drag the water to the height you prefer. Be careful what kind of water you use though. Very clear water won't look like water at all for game play. And very dark water won't look like map water either. Experimenting, while being creative, will be your best tool here. You might want to try using opaque water rather than what this tutorial is using. Just be sure your water has its bump map turned off.
Ok. How's our future TA map looking so far?
It's time to render the final map now. Render the image to disk with a size of 4096 x 4096. Save it as "icemap-24bit.bmp".
When it's finished rendering, go back to your terrain's editor and make a copy of the height map by clicking on Copy under the first B&W picture.
Now exit out of Bryce and open your photo editor program and paste the copied height map image into it and reduce the colors to 256 grayscale (because Bryce copied it as a 24-bit image). NOTE: Be sure that there actually are 256 shades of gray in the final height map image. Otherwise, there will be missing gaps in your height map, which will have to be edited by hand in Annihilator (not good).
Because the TOTALA.EXE game engine uses a height map that is 1/16th the size of its game map, some math has to be done. 4096 / 16 = 256. So re-size the height map image to 256 x 256. Its original size should have been 1024 x 1024, by the way. If it wasn't, go back to step 7 or your finished map will look like it was made with Lego blocks. Save the image as "heightmap.bmp".
Now load the "icemap-24bit.bmp" file. It should be 4096 x 4096 in size. Reduce the map's colors to 256 (8-bit color) by loading the TA palette file you created in step 1. Then save the map as "icemap-8bit.bmp". NOTE: Reduce colors using error diffusion. It'll help retain the original colors that Bryce used while creating the map.
Close your photo editor program and open Annihilator. Then click on "New Map" and browse for your "icemap-8bit.bmp" and "heightmap.bmp" files. You're almost done here.
Turn on the contour lines and verify that they line up with the terrain. If you see contour lines crossing over other contour lines, it means your terrain at that location is too steep. Units that go near that location will appear as if they're driving through the terrain rather than around it. Some people ignore this detail. But the ones that care about quality go back to step 7.
Use the map settings in Annihilator to set the sea level. The sea level will show up on the map as a red contour line. The map created here with this tutorial ended up having a sea level of 100 in Annihilator. Your map may be different.
Looking good!
Set the rest of the map settings to your liking and save your map as "Ice Map Tutorial.ufo" before placing any features on it. NOTE: Use a Surface Metal setting of 255 for metal maps (Core worlds) only. Use a Surface Metal setting of 1 for all other maps (Earth, Water, Martian, Acidic, Urban, Moon, etc).
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