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View Full Version : Creating custom sculpting brushes in CAW itself.


kiwi_tea
14th Feb 2012, 05:42 AM
So I was moving my files around, and for the first time I started playing around in the directory

UserToolData>TerrainSculptBrushes

It seems like it would be an extremely simple matter to add custom brushes here. Each brush is just a tga file (or two component tga files), mediated by the settings in TerrainSculpt.ini, such as this, for Mountain:


;;; Brush Profiles
;;; For each brush, add a section whose name begins with "Brush_".

; ID - a unique ID for the brush
; WiggleAngle - Maximum angle (in degrees) by which the brush wiggles at each step as it is dragged. Set this to 0 for no wiggle
; ComponentCount - Number of components the brush has.
; For each component, the following parameters can be specified. Use the prefix Compi_, for "i" th component
; Comp1_Op : Operation ID for component. 0 - RaiseLower, 1 - Smoothen, 2 - Level, 3 - Flatten
; Comp1_Texture : Name of the profile texture for the component
; Comp1_BaseTextureValue : The texture value to be taken as "base". Use of this value is dependent on the operation.
; When the opeation is "RaiseLower", a texture value higher than the base value causes the
; terrain to be raised and a texture value lower than the base value causes lowering.
; Comp1_AlignWithMoveDirection : Specifies whether or not the profile texture should be aligned with the direction of
; of movement of the mouse. 0 for false, 1 for true.
; Comp1_Width : Width of the area over which the brush gets applied at each step.
; Comp1_Strength : Strength of the brush


[Brush_Mountain]
Name = Mountain
WiggleAngle = 0
ComponentCount = 2
;
; First component (Mountain base)
Comp1_Op = 0
Comp1_Texture = MountainBaseBrush.tga
Comp1_BaseTextureValue = 0
Comp1_AlignWithMoveDirection = 0
Comp1_Strength = 0.01
Comp1_Width = 1.0
;
; Second component (Mountain ridge)
Comp2_Op = 0
Comp2_Texture = MountainRidgeBrush.tga
Comp2_BaseTextureValue = 0
Comp2_AlignWithMoveDirection = 1
Comp2_Strength = 0.01
Comp2_Width = 1.0

Now, I have been having no success adding a new brush. I've tried with 32, 24, and 16 bit images, all 64px as the originals are. All I get is a "crop" effect - rows of bumps like crop fields - and an out-of-memory crash (my CAW is LAA).

But this seems very worth testing and investigating. Additional brushes would be very handy for sculpting!

simsample
15th Feb 2012, 07:13 PM
I did play around with this a long time ago, but not looked at it recently. I will do some testing when I get chance. I must say though that if you are getting crashing that sounds like it could be that you have the file type wrong, as I was having crashing when making colour ramps incorrectly, for example.

The tga files are 8bit indexed colour, and have no alpha.

kiwi_tea
16th Feb 2012, 05:59 AM
8bit! Right. Will have to try again tonight! Thanks simsample.

Inge Jones
28th Sep 2012, 10:34 AM
Ok I found this thread. What is the problem with making this format in normal image editors? Do they not support it as a rule? My PSP7 happily opened and displayed one, and Peter tells me Gimp was happy too.

kiwi_tea
28th Sep 2012, 11:41 AM
Apologies for that Inge. It seems I was using an outdated version of Gimp, and even then, it wasn't that that version couldn't do it, it's the interface was nasty.

Inge Jones
28th Sep 2012, 11:52 AM
Let me know again later if you still have a need for the converter :)

Rockerduck
1st Oct 2012, 04:00 PM
Hold on, I'm kinda in a hurry right now so my apologies if I'm reading this wrong; but do these custom brushes (once they work) also work in game outside of CAW? I've been hoping for a larger terrain painting brush forever but I've been too lazy to even attempt to work this out myself. *blush*

kiwi_tea
2nd Oct 2012, 01:45 AM
These are sculpting brushes, not terrain painting brushes. They are also only as large as the settings in CAW allow them to be.