Exporting Data

The time has finally come to export the files from Terrain Builder. This seems a bit early, because we’ve barely placed any objects, haven’t done any config work or made changes to our layer setup, but it’s a good idea to export and test what you have quite often. Especially in the early stages when you’re still learning and not sure what can go wrong at any point in time.

Layers exporting

First step is exporting the layers. This splits up our source image files (Satmap, mask and normal map) into smaller tiles. First open up the mapframe properties and go to the Processing tab. Then export the satmap, normal map and surface mask (With 5 materials + normal map). Check the mapframe page for more info.

With the small terrain we have you can just use the Convert exported textures into *.paa files option, but for larger terrains we recommend using the .bat included there.

You’ll need to export layers every time you make changes to the layers.cfg, the mapframe settings or any of the source image files.

tb exporting layers

Roads exporting

Next up we want to export the roads. Go to File > Export > Shapes and as filename go to your data files at P:\tag\tag_sample\roads\roads.shp. You can use a differnt path for this, but the roadslib.cfg needs to be in the same folder, and you’ll need to set the path properly in the config.cpp

You’ll need to export your roads every time you adjust values in the table, or adjust / add / remove lines. You don’t need to reexport when adjusting the roadslib.cfg

tb exporting roads

WRP Exporting

Next up is exporting the WRP file. This is the primary file for the terrain, it includes heightmap data, object positions and which exported layer files go where. This means export whenever you adjust layers, the heightmap or any objects. Go to File > Export > WRP and save it in our data files at P:\tag\tag_sample as tag_sample.wrp.

Conclusion

This concludes this chapter of the terrain making process. By now you basically know the primary things to know in Terrain Builder, although more optional things will be added to this in the Editing chapter. The important things you should fully understand now are the mapframe settings and how to import and export all the files.

One important thing to note is that when working from absolute scratch, with no existing config, detail textures and layers.cfg or any of these things, you will need to create these files before you can do some of the steps we’ve done so far, but seeing editing existing files and creating them yourself require basically the same steps, we’ll handle this later on.

Usually when making a terrain you use some temporary placeholder files to get a quick terrain you can load up ingame, instead of spending days working on textures with no way of actually previewing them. As we move on through this guide you’ll also realize these source files are very far from perfect, which is on purpose. You should understand having a couple source files does not magically turn it into a great looking terrain, and that all things you download will need manual work done on them.