Under/overgrowth Tool Tutorial For Beginners

[Bensta]

Here a tutorial for all those that are not too sure how to use the over/undergrowth tool

UNDERGROWTH (Grass, Plants, Rocks ect.)

1, Make sure first you go to Render at top of editor then switch on, Toggle draw undergrowth and Toggle draw Overgrowth, this is so you can see the under/overgrowth in the editor once you have put it onto your map.

2, Make sure you are in the terrain editor and press the undergrowth button... Now you should see 'General' and 'Material' in the 'resources' bar 'General' is the General settings for all of the undergrowth, the settings can be seen in the tweakerbar in the picture, most are self-explanetory, (the one that arnt im not sure what they do but if any know please post)

3, Now you need to set your undergrowth materials, right click on the 'Material' folder in the 'Resources' bar and 'add material' Then name your material to whatever you like e.g grass, rocks, then pick any colour and press ok.

4, Now you will have a + symbol next to the 'material' folder in the resources bar, open up the materials folder and right click and 'add type' on the file you named grass,rock ect. Type any name you like again, in the box i called mine grass_1 . Note: you can add more than one 'type' to a material to give a mixed undergrowth effect. I have added a second 'type' and called it grass_2

5, Now you can pick your undergrowth by selecting a material type eg. grass_1 then in the tweaker bar it should look like the picture below. Click the box next to 'Mesh' and pick a mesh, i picked Seagrass2. Then click the box next to 'texture' and pick a matching texture, i picked Seagrass2 again. If you picked a second material type like me, then chose that material type's mesh and texture too. I picked smallplant1 mesh, and flower texture for the second type.

6, Now you need to change the settings in the tweeker bar for each material type, the most important is the Density setting, change this from 0.2 to 1 for now, all these seetings you will have to play with to get your desired effect. Bellow are my settings from grass_1. Remember to set the settings for anyother material type you added too.

7, Now you are ready to paint your undergrowth, by just left clicking on your terrain. If you picked more than one material type you should have mixed undergrowth like my grass and flower mix

Note: Undergrowth ingame will look dark unless you have generated lightmaps for your map.

OVERGROWTH (Trees)

Overgrowth is the same procces, but you only pick Geometry instead of mesh and texture when picking a material type. Also when you paint on your overgrowth you will have to press the Generate All button on the Editor bar on right hand side to see the overgrowth, also note you have to press it every time you make changes to your overgrowth also. Generate all button is not needed for undergrowth.

Edited December 10, 2006 by Bensta-IDF

[Catbox]

nice

[Bensta]

Ive noticed this isnt the only tutorial just for undergrowth but ohh well one more cant hurt

[1/2Hawk]

One thing about Overgrowth - it never really puts trees where you want them but rather evenly scatters them about. However, you can go to your Level Editor and snag a tree with the Move tool and it will convert it to act more like a static. You can drag it around anywhere and maybe bury it deeper in the ground if youre doing this on hills where you still want the tree to stand straight up but can see up under the corner of the trunk. The one thing to know doing that though is that it wont go away if you paint some other overgrowth in its place or erase it - and if you regen that overgrowth it wont consider it already there in terms of density (you'll get heavier trees than expected in that area if you moved a few). So buyer beware.

[[BF:A] Croupier]

Ive noticed this isnt the only tutorial just for undergrowth but ohh well one more cant hurt

The more the merrier Thanks Bensta.

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Thanks for that tutorial Bensta ! Should help a lot of people to understand the system.

Here's one additional Hint:

When editing existing under/overgrowth rather than creating new one, it might not show up properly. To fix that, re-assing 'mesh' and 'texture' for each material involved . Chances are that your Under/Overgrowth will appear afterwards

Have fun and thanks again , Bensta

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

Stickified this tutorial - should have happen long time ago, hehehe

[Bensta]

Guess i better update pics then

[heinzketchup]

bensta: what about the import from detailmap function - saves a lot of work and makes it far better than u can by hand

hawk : hawk static trees cost senseles meshmem and they make a lot of lightmaps so the only thing they are good for is to fill your vgaram

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

I tend to disagree with that last statement. If you want full control about the placement of trees you need to place them as statics. And there's no serious performance issues with todays machines if you don't overdo it.

From the graphics engine view there's no real difference between a palm placed as overgrowth and a palm placed as static.

[heinzketchup]

u forget that a pc with ati3450 or nv8500 is a todays machine too

for example last time i deleted the static trees on opk redon11 and the ligtmaps for this map go from 110mb to less then 60mb an there where not so much static trees

Edited September 30, 2008 by heinzketchup

[mschoeldgen[Xww2]]

You mean in the LMAtlasses ? Well the basic recommendation for BF2 was a machine with 512 MB RAM. When you consider the fact that nearly all mods use BF2 as parent and add their content on top of it , 1GB RAM seems to be a reasonable setup. Any gaming machine today should have that much.

I'm only saying there are cases where you simply can't use overgrowth. Creating this european alley would be impossible without static trees:

I am pleased to see that stickifying this thread has brought some live to it Now its up to Bensta to find those screenies again, hehehe. But the textual description in itself is already very helpful and helps to resolve some questions.

[Bensta]

Yea ill get on it at weekend and update pics, looks like i could update the tut too with some more advanced bits

[heinzketchup]

this european alley would be easy all u have to do is make a mix with high density and painting only points with your overgrowth tool

ok it was much easier and predictable in vietnam but it works in bf2 too

[heinzketchup]

sry im not that big story teller but i hope u understood what i mean

[Catbox]

thanks for adding that heinz... great tip...

[heinzketchup]

than copy the undergrowth.raw in to your overgrowth folder and rename it to overgrowth.raw and your overgrowth now fits to the detailtexture

[Uber_Soldat]

my overgrowth, and surrounding terrain is not rendering shadows when i do my lightmaps

i have selected all surrounding terrain to show, made sure both undergrowth and overgrowth are rendered, then i select compile lightmaps, trace terrain, objects primary and secondary are all selected. no overgrowth shadows, surrounding terrain is unchanged.

[Bossgator]

Any chance of getting some images for the ones missing in this tutorial?

[Bossgator]

How about a good tutorial on Overgrowth/Undergrowth with images? I found one that uses the undergrowth raw for placing the Overgrowth, but I'd rather just paint them manually.

[Catbox]

here is an older tutorial with pictures

http://www.bfeditor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5948