[asheshouse]

The waterways begin to link up.
Somme Canal and links across to the R. Meuse sketched in.
The major waterways are such vital navigational aids that I want to ensure all of the significant ones are included.



Here is the result with a 3pix river drawn with paintbrush tool.
There are odd irregularities which may need editing later.

[Guest]

8) Great.. my plause m8..

[RAF_Magpie]

This is looking very good Ashes, well done

[Edelmann]

Excellent work!!! Now rivers looks like...rivers :wink:

[asheshouse]

Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate Harbour with North Foreland beyond.
The river in view is the River Stour, which flows from Canterbury.
Finished all the English rivers --- not that that is saying very much.
Also done a lot of French canals but they dont look so good in screenshots.

I think the dark band in the distance coincides with the change to the "Far" view which is created by map_F.tga I think the colour of map_F can probably be adjusted to make this less apparent. Also I dont see why map_F cant have more detail on it to improve the distant view, but I might be wrong with that. Have to try it out.

[asheshouse]

Just trying out a little trial drawing in road, rail and woods.
What a disappointment going back to plotting road and rail at 45deg angles after all the nice sweeping bends on the rivers. Not a lot of choice though. I think the right approach is going to be to adopt a schematic layout for road and rail rather than trying to follow the map too closely. Too many bends just looks daft. So maybe think in terms of the towns as nodal points and use a simplified road geometry to link them all up.

[Rus_Andrey]

to asheshouse
Are you going to use these textures on their map?

[asheshouse]

Those textures look pretty good. Which map did they come from?
Is it the NWEurope map?
Which texture file is it?

[spitfire220]

For helping you, I inform you that there was a german airbase established at Chi

[Rus_Andrey]

Those textures look pretty good. Which map did they come from?
Is it the NWEurope map?
Which texture file is it?

screen №1 - from Normandy map
screen №2 - from Italian onlain map

I don't know which file is, I am not map maker. Sorry.

But I think that without these textures map will be very poor...

[lowfighter]

First one is fields1.tga or fields2.tga (they are very similar)
All possible and imposible crop field textures are present on Italy (including the one in second screenshot). The crop fields have usialy the word "fileds" in the filename.
Again here's Italy load.ini, just try on your map different ones and see how they look and where you can use them...
Some of them are not good to use on large areas because you can spot the tiling (check on Italy map you'll easily spot this disturbing thing on some areas), looks artificial. Still they can be used on smaller areas, or combined in a random fashion such that the tiling disappears or is reduced.


[MAP]
ColorMap = map_c.tga
HeightMap = map_h.tga
SmallMap = map_M.tga
TypeMap = map_T.tga
FarMap = map_F.tga
ReflMap = map_R.tga

[LIGHT]
LandLight = LandLight.mat
CloudShadows = CloudShadows.mat

[MAP2D]
ed_m01.tga
ed_m02.tga
ed_m03.tga
;map_ed.tga


[WORLDPOS]
CAMOUFLAGE = SUMMER
MONTH = 4
DECLIN = 41
PRESSURE = 745
TEMPERATURE = 20

[CUBE]
Down = Cube_bott.tga
East = Cube_right.tga
North = Cube_front.tga
South = Cube_back.tga
Up = Cube_top.tga
West = Cube_left.tga

[static]
actors.static

[text]
texts.txt

[WOOD]
Wood0 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood0.tga
Wood1 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood1.tga
Wood2 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood2.tga
Wood3 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood3.tga
Wood4 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/itawood4.tga
WoodMask2 = forest/summer/forestMask.tga
WoodMask3 = forest/summer/forestMask2.tga
WoodMiniMasks = forest/summer/MiniMask.tga
SideWood = forest/summer/ForestSide.tga

[APPENDIX]
HighClouds = Clouds256.tga
HighCloudsNoise = CloudsNoise.tga
// CloudsMap = CloudMap4x4km.tga
Moon = Moon\Moon0000.tga
ShadeNoise = land/Noise.tga
WaterNoise = water/WaterNoise.tga
WaterNoiseAnimStart = Water/Animated/WaterNoise00.tga
ForestNoise= forest/summer/ListForestNoise.tga
BeachFoam = water/Foam.tga
BeachSurf = water/BeachSurf.tga
BeachLand = water/RiverLand.tga
Tree0 = Trees\AlteredBush8a.tga
TreeLightMask = Trees\LightM256.tga

[WATER]
Water = Italy_DF/water/ItalyWater.tga
WaterColorATI = 0.140 0.175 0.230
//WaterColorATI = 0.150 0.225 0.180
WaterColorNV = 0.140 0.185 0.268
//WaterColorNV = 0.165 0.264 0.233


[ROADS]
Rail = land/summer/Rail
Road = land/summer/Road
Highway = land/summer/Highway

[FIELDS]
LowLand0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/LowLand_2neu.tga
LowLand1 = Italy_DF/land/summer/fields_handfields_med.tga,2
LowLand2 = Italy_DF/land/summer/FIELDS2_med.TGA,2
LowLand3 = Italy_DF/land/summer/fields_v2.tga,2
MidLand0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/macchia_neu4.tga,2
MidLand1 = Italy_DF/land/summer/dryland.tga,2
MidLand2 = Italy_DF/land/summer/dry1.tga,2
MidLand3 = Italy_DF/land/summer/macchia_neu3.tga,2
Mount0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/macchia_neu5.tga,2
Mount1 = Italy_DF/land/summer/grass_macchia_rock_v2.tga,2
Mount2 = Italy_DF/land/summer/bigcountry_dry2.tga
Mount3 = Italy_DF/land/summer/mount_top2.tga,2
Country0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/bigcountry.tga
Country1 = Italy_DF/land/summer/fields_dry2.tga,2
Country2 = Italy_DF/land/summer/dryland.tga,2
Country3 = Italy_DF/land/summer/fields_drygreen.tga,2
City0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/MidCity.tga
City1 = Italy_DF/land/summer/DownCity_dry.tga
City2 = Italy_DF/land/summer/CenterCity_dry2.tga
City3 = Italy_DF/land/summer/factory_dry.tga
AirField0= Italy_DF/land/summer/dry2_v2.tga,2
AirField1= Italy_DF/land/summer/Lowland_dry.tga,2
AirField2= Italy_DF/land/summer/macchia_dry.tga,2
AirField3= Italy_DF/land/summer/vulcan.tga
Wood0 = Italy_DF/land/summer/macchia_neu4.tga,2
Wood1 =
Wood2 = Italy_DF/forest/summer/ItaWood_far.tga,2
Wood3 =
Water0 = water/water.tga
Water1 = water/water.tga
Water2 = water/coastline.tga
Water3 = Italy_DF/water/dune_beach.tga

[asheshouse]

Thanks guys.

Rest assured that the textures on the posted images were just a quick fix to enable some images to be produced. They will be replaced by more suitable textures as things progress.
In the meantime I am working on map_h which Skunkmeister has made an invaluable start on.
After that I think it will be cities and roads which will get attention.

[asheshouse]

Here is the first draft of map_h. Many thanks to Skunkmeister for his help with this one.
It is based on the use of SRTM data from http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/Index.asp
This has been pre-processed using 3DEM software http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html
The Northeast France map uses 4 Geotiff files.
These are imported into 3DEM and the map projection changed to UTM (WGS84) which "flattens the map. This step is important for ease of alignment with other map overlays.
Shade Depth is set to 0 -- to remove shadows.
For NEFrance I have set sea level to -10 to display parts of the map below sea level.
Then the colour range is adjusted to grey scale using JV69_Bada's RGB-Height scale available here http://files.filefront.com/rgb+vs+haute ... einfo.html
The colour range for NEFrance was set to 0m to 704m and the intermediate heights spread evenly between. I may have to redo this to reflect the non-linear scale which IL-2 seems to use. See comments below.
Each of the 4 maps has been saved as an image and then joined together in Photoshop, where final editing has been done. The result looks good as a map image and undulating areas like the Ardennes seem to be represented well however the chalk cliffs of the channel coast are poorly defined. It looks like the lower RGB scale needs to be increased in height but keeping the higher levels as they are.

---- After posting this I adjusted the Greyscale range using the Tone Curve tool in Corel Paint but it would be better to use the correct range prior to exporting the images from 3DEM. -------

Note: In the image below I have made the sea grey for presentation purposes. In the map_h.tga this is of course black.

[Bee]

You are making history here. You realise that don't you?
Incredible work. Can't tell you how impressed I am!

[Nocturnum]

Is this actually going to work? It seems too good to be true. It really does look stunningly good, well done so far asheshouse. I'll be following this with interest.