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. You'll need this palette file later in step 11.
Open Vue 10 Infinite and set your camera's aspect ratio to square (1:1) with a resolution of 512 x 512 for now.
Click on your Sun light object in the scene and uncheck its "Point at camera" setting. Then use the Atmosphere Editor to choose a Spectral Model for your sky. Set the position of the Sun to an azimuth of 135 degrees and a pitch of 60 degrees. Set your Fog and Haze settings to 0% and 0m.
Go into Vue's Display Options and click on "Show camera FoV in Object properties" under View Options. Click on the camera and unlock the height for it. Then assign it a FOV value of 0.5 degress. Set the camera's position to X = 0m, Y = -3992.34km, and Z = 7989.13km. Then set the camera's orientation to Pitch = 153.44, Roll = 0, and Yaw = 180.
Remove any terrain and/or ground planes that are already in your scene. Now create a new 256 x 256 procedural terrain.
Position the terrain at X = 0m, Y = 0m, and Z = 0m. Set its size to X = 78km, Y = 88km, and Z = 10km (you'll need to unlock sizing proportions). Then open the Terrain Editor and click the "Zero Edges" button to disable that option. Create the shape of the terrain. When finished, click the "Export Terrain" button to save your terrain's heightmap in a BMP file (call it "terrain_heightmap.bmp"). Edit the BMP image and paint a very tiny black dot at the lower right corner of the image. This tiny corner is not used in the game, but TA still needs to see black somewhere in the heightmap to know where to count its height marks from.
Choose a material for your terrain. Avoid using displacement material. Go into the Material Editor and click the "Don't Cast Shadows" button to turn off shadows. NOTE: Shadows have to be turned off each time you load a new terrain material.
Render your scene. The 512 x 512 image is just for previewing your map so far. Don't worry about any map edges seen on the right or bottom of the image. The game will not show those edges of the map. If you notice the terrain changing from its 10km height slightly, it is because of Vue's procedural refining during terrain generation. Just change the terrain's height value (its Z size) back to 10km.
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 material has its bump value set to zero.
It's time to render the final map now. Render the image to disk with a size of 4096 x 4096. Save it as "terrain_color.bmp".
Now load the "terrain_color.bmp" file into your photo editor. 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 re-save the BMP file. NOTE: Reduce colors using error diffusion if possible. It'll help retain the original colors that Vue used while creating the map.
Close your photo editor program and open Annihilator 1.5. NOTE: Download the program to a temp folder and run it to install Annihilator.exe onto your Windows system so you can use Annihilator to create maps. Then click on "New Map" and browse for your "terrain_color.bmp" and "terrain_heightmap.bmp" files.
Click the "View Contour map" button to verify that the contours 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. NOTE: Sometimes, the terrain color map will appear as if it's shifted downward in relation to the terrain heightmap. Shifting the terrain color map upward, using your photo editor and re-saving, will quickly fix that.
Click the "Map Settings" button in Annihilator to set the sea level. The sea level will show up on the map as a single red contour line with blue contour lines under it for terrain that is below sea level. You may have to toggle contour lines off and back on again to update the sea level marking on the map.
Set the rest of the map settings to your liking and save your map as "Vue Terrain 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).