Object Library
To be able to place objects in Terrain Builder or import files with placed objects you need to have something called Library files or Templates with the .tml file extension. Whenever you want to use assets of a mod you need to create library files for them. Luckily this is quite an easy process, although for some nicely organized templates it does get a bit more involved. These are mappings of a name (template name) to a path of a model (on your P-Drive), plus some assigned color and shape which is just to show what’s what in the TB view.
Creating
We include some library files for you, so the following bit is just an example on how to make library files yourself in the future, you don’t actually need to do this for the A3 content.
Click the Create new library button in terrain builder in the Library manager panel.
You’ll get a popup to create a new library, first you need to check Create new library from directory and then there’s two ways to do things.
One is just selecting the entire A3 folder of your PDrive as Source Directory, checking Include Subdirectories which adds every single .p3d (The model format used by arma) into a single library file, but it is not recommended to this. First of all it’s very hard to find models this way, because there’s absolutely no organization, and also there are quite a lot of model files that you should not use on your terrains. Primary things like weapons, vehicle models and especially Proxy models.
Instead you should be thinking of the stuff you’d actually like to use in the terrain itself, think of things like Structures (buildings), vegetation (Trees, plants etc), rocks and similar things, so the recommended way is instead to go to the folders within a mod tag (CA for CUP, A3 for Arma3), selecting a subdirectory as Source directory, for example plants_f, then checking Include subdirectories, setting a color and clicking Ok.
You will need to do this for ALL assets you plan on using. Did you download a mod with extra trees and buildings that you want to use? You’ll need to extract them and create a library file for them in the same way.
Alternatively there is a tool out there to automatically create, subdivide and color template files, which we used to create library files for you that you can use instead. Below are the library files generated for all the Vanilla content (Altis, Tanoa, Malden and Livonia), plus a set of library files for CUP.
To use the files above you’ll need to import them. The easiest way is to download each one of the files and extract them to a TemplateLibs folder inside your TB project so you have all the .tml files there.
Next you want to click the Load Template library button.
Navigate to the TemplateLibs folder, select all the files (Ctrl+A) and press Open. Wait a couple seconds and you’re good to go. You can now use all the assets available in Arma3 and CUP without any problems. Whenever you create a new TB project and want to share your library files between them, you can copy files from an existing TemplateLibs folder, into the TemplateLibs folder of a new project and do the same import process.Importing
