How do you make a new tileset (ground texture) that works?

[Zerox]

Hey I know there are several people that know how to make new tilesets(ground textures). But I can not for the life of me figure it out.

I've tried making some of my own but I always have them turn out where they don't wrap properly (They look like square blocks). I am 98% sure that it has to do with the transparency as the originals have quite the range of them. But how do I get the transparencies to work and make them wrap properly when I'm making one?

How do you know where things are going to go too?

I know the original ones all use 512x256 textures so I'm assuming that other sizes would not work.

Sorry if I'm just a total noob at this but there aren't any tutorials on making them at all. I searched the Hive and other places with no luck. Not even google saved me this time.

So can anyone help me here?

 

[67chrome]

Ok, if I understand you correctly every piece of terrain your working on ends up looking like this

This is a problem with transparencies as you mentioned above, and by accessing the selection named Alpha 1 you can see what is alphaed out and what is visible. if you have photoshop you can do this by going to Select->Load Selection ->Alpha 1. By using the lasso or selection tools you can add or remove sections of the transparencies, allowing you to adjust were the tiles begin and end when blending with another tile. I have noticed that tilesets seem to support semi-transparancy as opposed to units that can only be 100% opaque or invisible. Tilesets such as Ashenvale's grassy dirt have a semi-transparent blend zone, and to shade with alpha channels in Photoshop you can edit the alpha channel in Quick Mask Mode, which is represented by a colorless icon that looks similar to the Japanese flag, located under the foreground and background color swatches on the tool bar. If you access this mode the alphaed-out zones should appear in red, like the picture shown here

as for tilesets being a specific size, their are two sizes of tilesets in WC3, represented by either a 1 or 2 when customizing a tileset in the editor. A tileset represented by a 2 is 512x256 (the size of two typical unit skins), but a tileset represented by a 1 is only 256x256, so their are two tileset sizes supported by the editor. The only real difference is that a "1" only has 2 tile versions that are not borders, while a "2" has 18 non-border tiles. This can be really fun to play with, especially because you can copy and paste pieces of terrain in the editor to create some pretty cool effects

of course, this is mostly just useful to store 18 different interior environment tiles, as the transition from one to another tottally different texture results in hard a blocky edges, though if you are trying to re-create an old game it can be used in exterior environments as well

Anyways, all that really matters for the file size is the ratio, you could override a 256x256 tileset with a 64x64 icon and it would break the icon into 16 pieces and use it as the tileset. As for the selection, if you have no selection saved often the entire tileset will turn invisible, and if you have more than 1 selection saved then it will screw up the alpha channels as well, so back to your question just make sure that you can access a selection called alpha 1, and it remains the only selection on the file

 

[Zerox]

Thanks 67chrome. I really appreciate the help. ^^