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EliasTheCrimson

Wurm Mapping In Google Sketchup

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Wurm mapping in Google SketchUp


What this is, and why you should care:

SketchUp is a 3D modeling program marketed by Google and designed for architectural, civil, and mechanical engineers as well as filmmakers, game developers, and related professions. The program, which is designed for ease of use,[2] allows placement of models within Google Earth.

Google's 3D Warehouse enables SketchUp users to search for, download and contribute free models.

In other words, SketchUp is a "lightweight" 3d modeling program with focus on ease-of-access while still retaining much functionality found in more advanced 3d modeling software. Many Wurmians use SketchUp to create models of towns and projects. With relatively simple tools and techniques, models of incredible accuracy can be made. If you're planning a big terraforming project or just want to see what your town looks like from a different perspective, SketchUp will significantly increase the quality of your life!

Getting started with SketchUp


1. Download SketchUp. Installers for Windows and OSX can be downloaded here: http://sketchup.goog...wnload/gsu.html

2. Grab some Wurm textures so you can paint your models to look more accurate. My own basic pack, containing a random mix of common textures extracted from the game archives, can be downloaded here: http://silenthillvil...urmtextures.rar

Extract the "wurmtextures" folder to your "\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Materials". You'll be able to access them with SketchUp's Paint Bucket tool.

3. Enable the Sandbox tool kit. These tools makes modeling Wurm's terrain grid easy.

Go to Windows -> Preferences -> Extensions and enable the Sandbox Tools

4. Familiarize yourself with the basic tools. Watch the startup tips and create your own models to get the hang of the tools. You can bring up a help window with the basic commands by clicking "Window > Instructor"

Important hotkeys:

Select Tool = Spacebar

Move Tool = M

Eraser = E (Select + Del will do fine)

Rotate Tool = Q

Paint Bucket = B

Getting started with Wurm terrain modeling


The simplest way to model Wurm's terrain is to create a large grid of two-dimensional squares:

1. When you have enabled the Sandbox extension, use the "From scratch" tool, which icon looks kinda like a 3x3 grid.

2. Then set the grid size to 4m, the default size is 3m. Do this by simply pressing "4" after selecting the tool (note the number in the lower right corner displaying the size).

3. Now to create the grid, it is like making a square. Just input the X-size first and then the Y-size, don't forget input is in meters, which is 4 times the number of tiles you want. A 4x4 is 16x16m. Making the square by point and click is fine too.

4. The resulting grid will be a rectangle divided in 4x4m tiles.

5. Mark and right-click the grid and explode it. Don't worry if Sketchup freezes when you do this. It can take a while if your grid is large.

6. Presto, your grid ready to manipulate.

Animation is good, so I made some GIFs.

RNycmm.gif

Creating the terrain grid with the Sandbox -> From Scratch tool

z6wIAc.gif

Modifying the terrain with the Move tool

You now have a set of terrain tile to work with. Use the Move tool to manipulate tile corners, borders or entire groups of tiles. For Wurm terrain, it only makes sense to move these vertically.

As a general rule of thumb, 0.1 meters in SketchUp = 1 dirt in Wurm.

To make precise adjustments with the move tool, you can type in distance values directly. For example, if you want to raise a modeled tile by 20 dirt, start moving the tile, hit the Up arrow key, then type "2" and press Enter. The tile will snap into place.

If you have the Wurm textures imported, you can use the Paint Bucket tool to paint tiles with Wurm textures. Very useful!

From this point on, you can copy-paste your terrain tiles and keep extending your map.

Hints and tips


  • Tich has created a library of useful Wurm models. You can browse them HERE. You might find useful resources uploaded by other Wurmians by using the search feature. Note that you can access the "3d warehouse" from inside SketchUp by clicking the "Get Models" button. If you don't want to make your own models, this will be a useful resource for modeling your town.
  • While you're creating or moving lines and edges, remember that these will try to "snap on" to other lines and edges. Take advantage of this by using the Tape Measure or Line tool to create guides to help you line things up with each other.
  • Wurm Wiki article on SketchUp mapping
  • This page is a work in progress. Keep posting your creations, tips and hints here! :)


    - Wurm mapping gallery! -


Edited by EliasTheCrimson
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something i learned about sketchup is that you need to think in terms of planes...

IOW, if you have 3 corners of a tile flat, and one raised up, you need to add a diagonal line to the tile in order to raise the corner.

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The sketchup site has loads of video tutorials.

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How about just have each tile made of four triangles?  That way you can just make the entire terrain out of the tiles and just move each corner, much like it is done in wurm right now.

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How about just have each tile made of four triangles?  That way you can just make the entire terrain out of the tiles and just move each corner, much like it is done in wurm right now.

thats another option of course... I usually try to avoid having more lines than I need to though. i prefer it to be as readable as possible

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You don't have to draw terrain one triangle at at time.  Go to Windows -> Preferences -> Extensions and enable the Sandbox Tools and use the From Scratch button.

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How about just have each tile made of four triangles?  That way you can just make the entire terrain out of the tiles and just move each corner, much like it is done in wurm right now.

In wurm every tile is made of 2 triangles

The sandbox tool creates a grid that consists of triangles like wwiiol showed

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Use 4m squares for your tiles.  Divide when necessary for elevations.  Move the corner points up or down .1m  for each dirt removed or dropped.

Creating mine layouts is fairly easy because the slopes are fairly consistent.  Creating an accurate terrain elevation map would take a LOT of mapping work.  Basically every corner point of each square will have it's own unique elevation.    It CAN be done,  but is a labor of love.

So far I have only done flat elevation maps when it comes to the surface terrain.  These are still helpful for layout planning.  good luck in your Sketching!  It's a great program.

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The sandbox tools seem really useful, thanks!

But how do I, for example, set the "tiles" to be exactly 4x4 meters? With what tool do I raise/lower corners?

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start drawing a square.  then type in '4,4' and hit enter.  the square will be sized to 4x4.  You will want to check your preferences to be sure that your measurements are set for meters. 

If your doing a flat elevation you can just duplicate the square (and whole rows of squares) to quickly create a grid of 4x4 tiles.  This isn't an exact representation of Wurm terrain because it does not include the tile borders and the small squares at the intersection of the border tiles.  But it is close enough to do the job.    Going through the trouble of including the borders would be beyond a labor of love  it would be obsessive!

Use the select tool to pic the points you want to modify, then move/drag the point up or down a smidge with the mouse, then type in the exact amount you want it moved.  (IE -.4  for a 4 dirt slop downward.)    There is a key combination to lock mouse draging to the vertical axis.  It's very handy for such things.  Unfortunately  which key it is  escapes me at the moment.  It's CTRL,  ALT,  or SHIFT.  + drag... one of those.

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start drawing a square.  then type in '4,4' and hit enter.  the square will be sized to 4x4.  You will want to check your preferences to be sure that your measurements are set for meters. 

Use the select tool to pic the points you want to modify, then move/drag the point up or down a smidge with the mouse, then type in the exact amount you want it moved.  (IE -.4  for a 4 dirt slop downward.)    There is a key combination to lock mouse draging to the vertical axis.  It's very handy for such things.   Unfortunately  which key it is  escapes me at the moment.   It's CTRL,  ALT,  or SHIFT.  + drag... one of those.

I guess it might be me being silly, but none of that works. Typing 4,4 while making a square creates some rectangle. I can't seem to move any points/edges with the select tool either.

Are you sure you're not leaving out any details?

EDIT:

I think I got it somewhat figured out.

Begin creating a grid with the 'From scratch' tool, type 4,00 in the lower-right corner box, make a huge grid, select it, select 'Explode' from the right-click menu. Select tiles to modify, use the 'Move' tool to raise/lower.

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Was going from memory... hang on.

Ok  here's the deal.  Use the move tool to move your points.  Forget what I said about using select (sorry about that).  You *can* lock the axis your dragging along  but it's a little wonky.  Basically you have to start dragging the point (or edge) on the axis you want.  THEN press and hold shift as you are in that drag process.  the dragging axis will then be locked as long as you hold down shift.    If you hold shift prior to dragging  it won't lock the axis.

It would be fantastic if you could just enter in the absolute XYZ values of each point.  But as far as I have seen, the free version of Sketchup does not give you that level / method of control over individual points.

Just like digging and leveling -- using the line tool and building your tiles and elevations one at a time will give you more control over what is happening.

Hope that helps to make things more clear.

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Use the sandbox tool for creating the tiles, enable it as described by a previous poster. Creating each tile manually is just silly. :P

I'll write you a short guide on how to create a grid and a few guidelines on how to manipulate this grid:

1. When you have enabled the Sandbox extension, use the "From scratch" tool, which icon looks kinda like a 3x3 grid.

2. Then set the grid size to 4m, the default size is 3m.

3. Now to create the grid, it is like making a square. Just input the X-size first and then the Y-size, don't forget input is in meters, which is 4 times the number of tiles you want. A 4x4 is 16x16m. Making the square by point and click is fine too.

4. The resulting grid will be a rectangle divided in 4x4m tiles.

5. Mark and right-click the grid and explode it. Don't worry if Sketchup freezes when you do this. It can take a while if your grid is large.

6. Presto, your grid ready to manipulate.

* To manipulate it, use the move tool. Using it as is will let you move individual corners, tile borders or tiles. You can move large areas at once by selecting them first.

* You will want to move corners vertically, along the Z-axis. To do this, press the Up-arrow after grabbing the corner(s) you want to move. Then the movement will be restricted to the blue axis.

* In the preferences, change the Click style to Click-move-click. I prefer this mode, since it makes it much easier to start the move, lock it to the blue axis and input the value.

* When I model, I don't usually drag the tiles into place unless I align them with another tile. After initiating the move, locking to the Z-axis as well as indicating the direction (up or down) of the move, I type how many meters I want to move the terrain and press enter.

* A very important note that ought to be in the start of this post: 1 dirt=0.1m

There are many tricks to modelling towns and such in Sketchup, it really warrants a wiki article. I only use Sketchup to model terraforming projects, so I for one don't know the tricks when modelling houses or mines. I would have put a few pictures in this guide, but I'm on vacation and I don't have any of my models with me.

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This is why I say go to the video tutorials on sketchup's site to learn the basics.  Without understanding the simple stuff Sketchup is a frustrating, clunky tool but once you get the hang of it it's amazing.  There are so many tricks and shortcuts.

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[me=Beast]steals the topic[/me]

you might wanna see what kind of map i made for roadside.

roadsideek0.jpg

Creating an accurate terrain elevation map would take a LOT of mapping work.  Basically every corner point of each square will have it's own unique elevation. It CAN be done, but is a labor of love.

Tell me about it

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Nice :)

Oh, and you're not stealing at all, my original thought WAS actually that this was going to be a "Post Your" creations/tips thread ^^

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i just downloaded it...

then i thought that for planning blender (that i had already installed and learnt) would probably work well too.

but i'l ltry this... probably google sketchup is easyer

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Good Stuff...

Thanks for that Ketza!  I bow to da masta!  I'll have to check out some of those tips when I get home.

andreea -  Sketchup has a few jaw dropper moments when you realize how cool the modeling technique is.  A very fun application.  The suggestion to go through the video tutorials is a good one.  Note:  I had to download the turorial to get them to work.  They aren't really 'videos' as much as they are scripts that run Sketchup.  Be sure to run through them all.

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videos? is there anything to listen to? if yes, i hope to find some italian one... i am not good at understanding spoken english

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As Mouchard said, the tutorials take place inside of Sketchup. There is no sound, but the instructions are in written English and include visual guides.

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I found that using the 'smoove' tool helps when doing this too, I set the radius to one, and I can just click the corner/side/tile I wish to raise, type in the height in meters I want to raise, and hit enter, and it gets done that way, works wonderfully well, I mapped out many plans for things in under 15 mins, because its really easy to do.

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I'm not talking about the self-paced tutorials.  I'm talking about the online video tutorials:

http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html

edit: Dammit...these aren't the same videos I watched back when i was learning. what did they do with those?

edit 2: ahh, here we go: http://download.sketchup.com/downloads/training/tutorials50/Sketchup%20Video%20Tutorials.html  They're for SU 5 but they are much better quality (visually and content-wise).

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I even found this page, which appears to be a gallery for Wurm models created by Tich: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=2be414a114815b9ef9d5388d05b6f880

Yea, i did those on the last map, when i was planning the housing for Rockcliff

it also contains most of the tile types, fences, walls etc

Sweet :)

Got any usage tips? For example, is there any way to apply those materials to a previously created terrain grid?

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