M&B Strategic Map Creation

M&B Strategic Map Creation

In this tutorial i will describe my workflow for making the strategic map for POP4.

Overview :
I) Software used
I) Design Map in L3DT
II) Mesh reduction with Meshlab
III) Cleaning and expanding the mesh with Wings3D
IV) Texturing, party and border relocation with Thorgrims Editor
V) Last steps for getting the map to work in Warband

I) Software Pipeline

I will be using several free / open-source software so first of here is a list of what we need:
– L3DT
– Meshlab
– Wings3D (or any other 3d modeling program)
– Obj2Map and Map2Obj
– Thorgrims Editor (not entirely neccesarry, but i used it for its ability to give a good preview of the ingame rendering)

The general software pipeline i used is the following:
1) Create a highpoly terrain mesh with L3DT
2) Reduce and repair the mesh with Meshlab
3) Expand the borders, cleanup and texturing with Wings3D
4) Convert the Obj file into Map.txt
5) Use Thorgrims Editor to further texture and check the map
6) Convert the Map.txt into Obj – go back to step 3 (do this till the final result is satisfying)
7) Relocate the parties and borders in Thorgrims Editor
8) Convert parties.txt into parties.py to get access to the source code
9) make sure module.ini and parties.py of Warband is updated and compile the module system

done…

I)
First i got a rough design map on paper

Getting this design into L3DT – using the design map approach:
L3DT gives you the ability to create heightmaps via a so-called design-map, thats a very low-resolution overview map which contains informations like altitude, erosion, peaks, climate etc..

After i was satisfied with the final result in L3DT i exported the map as OBJ file (note – i didnt used any reduction so the file was about 150 mb and had around 2.5 million tris).

II ) Reduction of the Mesh via Meshlab

III) Cleaning and expanding and quick texturing the mesh via Wings3D

IV) Texturing, party and border relocation with Thorgrims Editor

V) Getting all info into Warband

Note: During the next weeks i will add more detail to this tutorial