Middle Earth DEM Project

[monks]

Been busy! We put together a 40K terrain demo recently. We'll be outputting distribution maps and textures from GTS for ProLand, OuTerra and Terragen.



You can check out some shots here of the terrain in OuTerra and ProLand:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...nt/gallery.htm


I'm using an 8192 terrain in Terragen at the moment. The sea is created by applying a water shader to a sphere object. Rivers and lakes can be created in a few ways.
Seer's method of using heightfields:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/re...gen_WIP_01.png

Or BigBen's method of using a plane object.
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/re...gen_WIP_02.png

Both will prove useful. The idea is set up a project that can be used for a variety of shots. We'd like to eventually output xml from GTS so we can streamline working with GTS texture maps in TG.


monks

[Ascension]

I really dig that first screenie there, the other Outerra shots are pretty good, too.

[monks]

We've got a better demo of ProLand now Ascension- it can handle greater res, but it's going to take us a while to process and render the 40 K map.

monks

[monks]

After working on this project for a long time now, I've increasingly been dissatisfied with the results from terrain generators for *certain aspects* of terrain modelling. Having tried modelling a complete mountain range with splines in World Machine I got some pretty good results, the best yet, but the effort required is very intensive, not to mention a huge load on your computer system.
Spliines are fantastic- no doubt, but it still requires a lot of manual effort to get those mountain folds= the structures that define the river systems and valleys. If we had a procedural way of generating splines in convincing structures to describe ridges and rivers, then that would pretty much solve that. But I'm guessing the problem is not trivial- and devs are busy people!
Also, now we're using the planet renderers, I'm beginning to see shots from orbit of our terrain compared to real world terrain. It really shows up the differences.

I tried a new workflow using real terrain data. I think the mountains look better now when viewed from orbit..



They need a fair bit of work though because the valleys don't naturally fall into the surrounding terrain. I can do that in something like Leveller manually. I've pretty much been doing that anyway with the old method, so it's not actually any more work.
The Alps tend to fall away in height to the south, so I'd have to apply to some height offsetting in that area to beef up the mountains around Isengard.
We could also extend this idea to hills too as we have distribution maps for those. We might even be able to extend it to every part of the model synthesising the real world terrain with the underlying surface. I've got an idea that uses watersheds- build the terrain via watersheds. That would create the most believable river systems.

monks

[monks]

Been playing with bits and bats. Quick demo of Carn Dum in Sketchup.



monks

[Redrobes]

The new 40K map has completed processing and some sample images are up on the Dev gallery.

http://me-dem.me.uk/galleries/Development/gallery.htm

Still some problems to fix up but its heading in the right direction.

[Ascension]

Great shots.

[torstan]

That really is looking amazing.

[Redrobes]

The pic really doesn't do it justice so I thought I would post this little diagram to show what we have been doing for all this time over the last few weeks. There was a bit of a screw up with the light map so I fixed it for this one tile and placed it into context. When Monks does the run it should fix this for all the tiles but then thats another two weeks of processing to get to it. Still, Proland does its own light mapping so the next stage plan is to see it in that app. Outerra does not use any colour map at all. It generates its own.

[monks]

I like that last pic! Yes, it's a bloody good map man.
We've talked about the changes we need to make if we can. The snow coverage and lightmap being the biggest immediate changes.
I didn't know I was doing a run...lol Well, no problemo obviously.

I could get you masks for the erosion on the mountains from World Machine if you want them. I don't know what would be involved in incorporating those.
I think it'll look amazing in ProLand. Getting our masks into OuTerra will be further out.

monks