Mapping: Rubber Matting Paths

[Rhino]

Hey all,

Here is a small tutorial on my new Rubber Matting for use in Main Bases and FOBs.

Since these are basically roads you should have an understanding of how roads/splines work in BF2 and if not, please read these tutorials:
Roads - Detailed Explanation - Official BF Editor Forums
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f18...rsections.html

For this tutorial I've made a quick tent compound here:

Which by the end of this tut is going to end up like this:

Installation:

First download these files:

Download: http://realitymodfiles.com/rhino/sta...e_09-11-11.rar
(Note: these files are only for use within the PR:BF2 mod and no where else without permission from me)

and then extract the .rar into your pr_edit, over the top of your objects folder and it will do the rest.


References:

These should be used to help with more realistic placement. They are also used in Afghanistan in r/l as in the winter the ground gets really muddy although they haven't been used anywhere else as far as we know, they might well be used in the future for other bases etc.

Download: http://realitymodfiles.com/rhino/ref...s_09-11-11.rar


Placement:

Now as I've already mentioned, these rubber mattings basically work like other roads, but with a few key differences. Main differences being the way they are used and the settings that are applied to them.

So first with the road tool active, if you expand Road Templates you will find two new Road Templates in there after installing these files: Rubber_Matting_3x4 and Rubber_Matting_6x8. The 3x4 and 6x8 are how many small strips of rubber matting is in a square block which is pretty irrelevant for you guys but what is relevant is the 3x4 tile is 1m wide and 6x8 tile being 2m wide. These road templates both use exactly the same texture, just the 6x8 one mirrors the texture to make it twice as wide


Now to place these down you just place them down like any other road but you really need to place them down in strait lines, which I would recommend doing this using grid snapping and keeping these splines pretty much on the grid.


Once you have done this, connect the road to the correct road template you want to use, for this first one I'm going to use the Rubber_Matting_6x8 road template and when you connect these up I strongly recommend using the same prefix on each of the roads so you can easily find them later in the .con files to change there settings in bulk, which we will go into later. I'm going to give each of my rubber mats a "rm" prefix, with also separation the large from the small with "rml" for large and "rms" for small, then just numbering each one as I go so this road I'm going to call "rml01"


Now after connecting your spline, if the road is totally strait you will not see the road texture at all like my one here:


This is because we have not changed the settings yet and the default settings do not work when the spline is totally strait. What we need to do is change 5 of the spline's settings, turning Octaves to 0 as per normal, but also on top of that we need to change all four fade settings (Road.FadeDistAtStartLeft, Road.FadeDistAtStartRight, Road.FadeDistAtEndLeft, Road.FadeDistAtEndRight) from 0/3 to 0/0 which makes the road so the ends do not fade at all and now we can see the road perfectly, but also on top of that at the end of the road where it would normally fade away, it dose not which is what we want for this rubber matting


Taking a closer look at our road, with also turning "Toggle Draw Splines" off in the render settings for the final picture we can see how our rubber matting looks up close



Now lets Create all our other splines but this time, we are not going to change all the fading settings as doing each one by hand is going to take for ever. Instead just connect up the road and we know pretty much how its going to look by where the spline points are and you can change any you really need to see how big they are when working, but the plan is to change all the settings in one go once we have placed all the splines down like I have done here:


Once we've connected up all thous spines to there correct templates I open up your "Roads.con" file in your /pr_edit/levels/*my map*/Editor/ folder and we can see all the splines in our map. Now if you have other roads in your map your rubber matting roads are going to be mixed in with your normal roads so before we do anything we should find all our rubber matting roads, and cut them out into a new text file so we don't edit our normal roads settings at the same time. Note if you prefixed all your rubber matting spines, they shouldn't be too hard to find each of them and also if you did all your rubber matting splines together without editing or making any other roads at the same time, they should all be grouped up together in the file.


Once you have copied them all into another file, do a Find and Replace for "Road.SetOctaves 3" to "Road.SetOctaves 0" which will remove all your Octaves and also "0/3" to "0/0", which should change all your fade settings. Copy these changes back into your Roads.con file and save it up.



Note: you will need to reload the editor (not just the map) for these changes to take affect.


Note: Some of your splines may not connect up quite right and may need a tiny bit of tweaking with grid snapping turned off just to get them just right as well:


Once that is all done it should look something like this



A couple of last things to add. If you want to have larger widths of matting all you need to do is place splines up next to each other and you can crate nice blocks of the stuff like so



It is also possible to use these in bends, but I wouldn't recommend it as I've not seen it in any refs and it destroys the grid:



That's all, I hope this will help you guys to make more detailed bases with this

[pfhatoa]

small but important additions. I like it

edit: ah, sorry missed it.

[Rhino]

Originally Posted by pfhatoa

small but important additions. I like it

Please post comments in the blog post, replies here should be questions about the tut, thanks

Rubber Matting Paths - Project Reality Forums

[IINoddyII]

Locking this thread.

Seems to be a magnet for spambots.

Apologies for any inconvenience.