Those maps were generated using scag's Starcraft Picture Mapper 3.0. The problem with maps created from pictures is that they are unplayable. This tutorial will show you how to make playable maps using the picture mapper.
On September 07 2008 14:30 d(O.o)a wrote:
For the newest version of the picture mapper.http://www.clanscag.com/
For the newest version of the picture mapper.http://www.clanscag.com/
Getting started
First you will need a clean image to work with. What I mean by clean is that your image can't have too many colors or variation in color because although it might look fine in the minimap:
The actual terrain generated to create the image is unplayable:
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For this tutorial, I will show you how I created a map using this pentagram gif. A fun way to find images is to use advanced google image search, and specify only to look for "GIF" images.
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Setting the colors
So you found a good image, now we need to setup proper colorization so the picture mapper will create the right terrain that we want. This is the hard part, because it's all guess-and-check. But luckily for you, I already tested the best color combination, it's light blue (#00FFFF) on red (#FF0000):
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The reasoning is because this color combo generates the most walkable terrain for the most map tilesets. Here is the list of working tilesets with red/light blue:
For space and ice - red is a barrier, and blue is walkable.
For Desert, Red is walkable, and blue is barrier.
For example, on my pentagram picture I flood filled the pentagram to be light blue, and the floor to be red. Then I selected Desert tileset, so the red terrain translated to walkable, and the pentagram is the unwalkable terrain. Selecting space tileset would make only the pentagram walkable.
The other tilesets always generated doodads in my test and should not be used.
Hurry up and finish the tutorial!
Ok so you throw your GIF or JPEG picture into the picture mapper, click GENERATE and it creates the map for you! Done!
You might want to cleanup all the satellites it puts on the map, they are just there assuming you want the whole map visible. For melee purposes, I used CTRL+A to select them all and delete, starting with a clean map.
Now you know how to do it! Have fun...
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A bit more advanced
You can, of course, create melee-friendly maps by using regular pictures. here is one I was able to successfully create. It is very time consuming trying to get the colors to match a walkable tileset, so I don't recommend it to people unfamiliar with brightness, RGB and contrast changes that will need to be tweaked to get the colors to matchup.
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The issue is having enough room to build, and a clear path to each base. For this example I had to make a big snow clearing for each base because it was filled with random bits of generated doodads and unwalkable terrain.
NOTE: The program will only generate 128x128 maps, but anything else is too small or big anyway. Snow is definitely the easiest tileset to use for creating maps from real pictures. Perfect-white does not translate into snow, you need to get more of a medium gray though.