Simplified Sea/Land Transition Tile creation

[Wrench 9,846]

This post comes about in response to a question on the 3rd Wire Boards. I thought this might be of some help, so I'm posting it here as well.

 

Now, most of our Terrain Engineers ™, pretty much know the ins-and-outs of tile creation, but there's always that issue with the transions - those pesky sea-to-land transiton tgas, that require a Alpha Channel to simulate the wave actions.

 

So....I give you a rather "quick and dirty" way to create them.

 

(BTW, this assumes that you're already created the bmp version of the tile, and are now going to add the ocean.)

 

Below is one of the new port/ship basin tiles for Tunisia, showing the alpha only (there are 6 new ones like this coming)

 

 

1. Open the 24-bit .bmp tile with PS

 

Yes

 

2. Create a black-and-white 8-bit alpha channel with the water being dark and the land being light.

 

Yes AND no!! (btw, you've got it backwards .. land is ALWAYS dark, water is ALWAYS light)

I'll give away my secret for creating sea/land transitons....

Open the Sea1.tga (if desert terrain). Switch view to Channels, turn OFF the R/G/B, so ONLY the Alpha channel shows. With the rectangular marque tool, outline the ENTIRE Alpha layer. Copy the entire alpha, and on the NEW transition tile, "Create New Channel"; this will be an all black alpha. Paste in the one you just copied off the Sea1.tga. Now, the entire thing will register as water, so you'll need to turn the R/G/B back on, so to get the outline of the Land sections. You'll need to zoom in to at LEAST 200-300%. Using whichever brush you like, I prefere one of the soft fuzzy ones, paint the sea/land -beach area- with black, letting the 'fuzzines' carry 1 or 2 pixels onto the land. Fill in the rest of the Land with Solid Black. Leave the Ocean portions completely alone!!! You want that pebbly-gray bit to simulate the wave/swell actions. In the tile above a city-port tile, you'll need a hard edged brush to create the solid edges of the ship basin. For those that don't need it, like sea2farm50, the soft brush works well for the beaches.

 

3. Save these two together in one file. Here's where I have a question. Do I save these directly as a 32-bit .tga file or do I save it as a .PSD file and then convert it to a 32-bit .tga file?

 

Nope. "Save as..." whatever-the-name-of-the-tile-is.tga". It's just like making a serial number decal from a bmp. For tiles, you'll still want the original bmp, as that'll be needed for the Terrain Editor, when adding the new tile to the texturelist.ini.

 

Questions? Comments? Elaborations? Post them in the Mods and Skinning Forum, and if they fit, I'll add them to this thread.

 

wrench

kevin stein

Edited November 17, 2009 by Wrench