This is the first in a series of mini-tutorials for Mapping for LWR.
Rather than going by the step by step approach I'll be covering various things you may need to know.
If you are new to BFME mapping check out these tutorials to get you started in mapping.
How to make EA quality maps by M@tt
Extended guide to BFME Mapping by Haldir
How to set up a Skirmish/Multiplayer map by M@tt
LWR Mapping Features a prototype for this series of articles by me.
There are some differences between mapping for LWR and mapping for the basic game.
The key difference is in the props and terrain textures you can play with.
These props come in many different varieties from new grass thickets, fog planes, terrain textures, new rocks, new units, new buildings and new particle emitters.
For this guide I'll be focusing on the Grass Thickets.
While I was working on LWR maps I had trouble working with the limited grass varieties from the standard game and the lack of patches of grass making making realistic grasslands difficult.
So I began creating some new grass types that bundle together grass into thickets and allow me to more easily create grasslands.
Over time there's been many, many new varieties added covering pretty much every shade and type of grass imaginable.
I also created different sizes and lengths of grass.
These grasses use a uniform set of textures which are numbered.
The different grass types are LWGrass which is high grass around 1m tall so it will generally come up to the chest of units, LWgrassshort which is a bit shorter and is about waist length, LWgrassSmall which is about knee length and LWGrassSingle which is single clumps of grass.
There are currently 73 Grass texture types ranging from simple greens to reds, oranges, wildflowers and dry grasses.
It will take a while to familiarise yourself with them and find the best types for your map.
These grasses function like non harvestable trees and sway in the wind.
When choosing grasses for your map you need to choose the right type so green for grasslands, dry for dry grasslands etc and you should pick more than 1 type to give the map more variety and realism.
Try to pick a complementary grass just like you would for texturing a map and try and keep it close to the colour of the terrain beneath it.
For Rohan grassland type maps I tend to use LWGrass63, LWGrass64 and LWGrass67 which are similar tones and vary slightly.
63 is a nice green grass, 64 is a bit drier in tone and 67 is a similar dry texture.
You want to avoid just blanketing the map in grass to cut down on lag, the bigger the map the less dense it should be.
I've come up with a good technique for maximising coverage while minimising the amount of objects needed.
The idea is to sort of fill an area without having grasses overlap by changing the angles at which you place them.
Generally you'll place them at roughly 90 degrees from each other in a criss cross fashion with small gaps here and there so it fills an area.
You also want to keep areas around roads, features and bases clear so that bases don't randomly have grass in them.
Along with the grasses are some reed, flowers and cattail objects which are very similar.
