SC2Mapster

Quote from Qancakes: Go

Stop up and think for a moment. Is a brief moment of fame worth more than self-improvement and personal enjoyment?

Think about it.

The whole point is that there is no personal enjoyment for him because the pop system sucks ass. I personally have decided not to do any sort of sc2 modding before they change that shit. if they dont I do not need to "deal with it" because I can just do something else instead of wasting my time with begging blizzard to change anything. We are still the customers here and I think a lot of people would not have bought sc2 if they knew that blizzard eliminated most of the custom game fun.

There is a script called m3 sequence that comes with the export/import tools. You can ad animations there. So you add an animation, tell it which frames belong to that animation and then make a normal keyframe animation in max.

Did you use the m3 sequenzer script to set up the animation ?

Greetings, as you all know, there is a 10,5mb map size limit, which means we can not really import many Assets (like 10 models) this renders any plans for total conversions or any big non scifi projects impossible. The only chance of working around that limit is creating a custom .sc2assets file, but Blizzard would propably ban you for that. The best way would be a custom .exe containing additional files, like in wc3. Does anyone know if this is possible in sc2 or will I just get myself banned if I try to do a big mod ?

I'd model some towers for you, just send me a pm~

There is nothing special on that texture, just use a white brush for the highlights and a brown brush for the dirt.

Just ask a friend to lend you their account for a few minutes

I think Im gonna participate this time. We have time til next week right ?

Hello, In this tutorial Im gonna give the people using Photoshop CS4 a simple way to convert standard (purple) normalmaps into the kind used by Starcraft2 (orange). This is based on this excellent tutorial by Gadaffy2 http://forums.sc2mapster.com/development/tutorials/6030-tutorial-normal-map-conversion-from-purple-to-orange/

In Photoshop CS4 there is a wonderful tool called "Actions". An Action is basically a recording of things you do in Photoshop that you can create and save. You can then use this Action on as many files as you want with a single click. This obviously saves us a lot of work because we only have to do it once and can then apply it on any image we like. I recorded a very simple Action that does the steps explained in Gadaffy2's tutorial (except some unnecessary steps) and changes any picture into a normalmap useable by sc2.

You can download that action here Link Removed: http://www.mediafire.com/?39ael2xl9pcp3ys

Now Im gonna explain to those of you who never used actions before (which is the group of people this tutorial is written for) how to use actions in Photoshop CS4. (you should also try using it in older photoshop CS versions, I dont think the interface has changed a lot)

Here we see a simple sample image.

You need to make sure that your image is an rgb image. To do this go to ImageModeRGB Color

Now press ALT + F9 to open the "Actions" window (if it isnt already open) or open the "windows" menu and make sure its shown

tick that option

The Actions window looks like this

I could be hidden as a tab in some other window (like the "History" window is a tab in the "Actions" window in this pic) so you may have to search a little.

Now click the little button I marked with red

and select "Load Actions"

Navigate to the folder you saved the SC2.atn file in and load it.

You'll now have a folder in your Actions window called SC2. In it is an Action called NormalMapOrange (creative name right?)

Select it and hit the play button.

Your image should now look like this...

with the channels set up like this.

Now save your normal map as a .dds file, the compression settings are dxt5 and interpolated alpha. (.dds plugin here http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html)

That's it. Now just run the Action for every normalmap you might want to convert and dont forget to save them.