Terrain Texture Painter (Terrain Painter)

Terrain Texture Painter (Terrain Painter)
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Starting the Terrain Texture Painter

Start the Mission Editor by pressing F11.
Select Texture Painter from the Window Menu.

Examining the Terrain Painter

The last of the tools we will examine in this section is the Painter. Among all the tools, this is probably the most straightforward. If you have successfully loaded the Terrain Painter, you will see a something like the image above. Now, if you've used any tools like WorldCraft, Wally, or any of a number of other content creation tools, you will be familiar with the concept of the Terrain Painter Pallet, but just in case.

The Terrain Texture Painter Palette

Currently, the pallet is limited to 6 textures. Also, the palette texture spots must be loaded in counter clockwise order. In other words, if you tried clicking on the Add. button in the upper right corner right now nothing would happen. Try clicking the Add.. button in the middle left. Load the WeirdTerrain.png texture.

Table 4.54.

When you click either an Add. button or a Change. button, the Load File. dialog pops up. If you take a quick look at the paths displayed in the dialog, it will become clear that for a texture to be available to the Texture Painter, it needs to be in the egt/data/terrains directory. You can create folders under this and the tool will find your textures there. The tool will automatically find files in either of the following two formats:

Portable Network Graphics (*.png)
JPEG (*.jpg)

I strongly suggest using PNG files. This way you can avoid the artifact issues with JPEGs. Also, you should adhere to strict rules regarding the dimensions and color content of your graphic files:

Table 4.55.

Dimension	Suggested: 256x256 pixels Required: Power of 2 and Ratio less than 16:1 (i.e. L less than or equal to 16* W and vice versa)
DPI or PPI	Suggested: 72
Pixel Depth/Colors	Suggested: 24/16 Million
Alpha Layer	Suggested: None. (Part and parcel with 24-bit Pixel Depth)

Table 4.56.

On the right side of the screen you should see a window that looks similar to this. Currently, there are two of six allowed textures enabled. The purpose of this window is to act as a sort of painter's palette for textures. Simply by dabbing your cursor on (clicking on) a loaded texture, you can use that texture to paint the terrain with the now familiar brush. As with the Terrain Editor, you can change the shape, size, and hardness of the brush. In this case, the hardness will affect blending. A softer brush provides a softer stroke, therefore less of the new texture is applied per stroke, with more of the underlying texture showing through. Give it a try. Click on the WeirdTerrain texture and paint some lines, swirls, whatever. Cool eh?

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