How to create Bomb Craters

Bomb Craters
by ria.enigma

**Skill Level:** Beginner

Bomb craters are an easy way to add a touch of realism to your map, and once you have a working process down, they only take a mere couple minutes to construct.

**Defining area size -**
Although you can make your bomb craters as small/big as you want, I've found the effective size to be 4 surface units. You can see the size of a unit by turning on the gridlines feature within Battlecraft.

**Defining material -**
The underlying material of your surface map will make a lot of difference in how players & vehicles respond when moving over the crater. Best results would be dry dirt or dry sand.

Lets start.

1) Load up your level in Battlecraft. Once your map is opened, be sure to select Textured Wireframe Mode to display your gridlines.

2) Locate the area where you would like your crater to be created. Youre going to want to center your crater around 4 units (2 rows of 2).

3) Once your found the spot you want a crater, select the terrain editing mode and select the point manipulation tool. By default, the auto smooth button is selected, but we do NOT want to use it - so deselect it.

4) Using the point manipulation tool, select the center of your 4 units. With the point manipulation tool, you will see that there are 9 points to your 4 grid squares (3 points on top, 3 in the middle and 3 on the bottom) - make sure your find the exact center of your area for the best effect.

5) After you select your point, youll notice it turns red. This is just an indication that you have selected it to be edited. With the - (subtract) key on your **NUMERIC** keypad (NOT the key right below your function keys (F1-F12) - the key on the far right of your keyboard), lower the terrain from 8 to 12 presses. You may want more/less depending on how shallow or deep you want your crater.

Now that we have a hole, lets give it some detail.

6) Switch to the material map editing mode and select dry dirt (or whichever material you want the crater to be). Make sure your tool size is only #1.

7) Paint your 4 units with the material you selected.

If you plan on adding more than one crater, your going to want to repeat steps 1 - 7 before continuing.

8) Once you have all the craters you want, its time to generate surface maps so we can see the texture changes.

**NOTE: If youve done any previous surface map painting, regenerating surface maps WILL remove them - so its up to you if you want to do this step.**

9) Finally, you can touch up your surface map using the surface map painter. If you just regenerated surface maps in step 8, youll probably want to lightly paint over the crater using the same material you assigned the surface in step 7. If you DIDNT generate surface maps, then you can simply use the surface map painter's DARKEN tool to get a reasonably good effect.

After its all done, save your level and test it out in the game. If the crater seems too deep, go back to step 4 (point manipulation) and instead of using the (-)minus key, use the (+)plus key to raise the area back up a couple notches.

If you want to add even MORE realism, follow my **OMAHA BEACH SMOKE Tutorial** and smoke to these craters!