Middle Earth DEM Project

[monks]

Hey dudes, been away for some time. Been banging my head against Terragen 2 for the last couple of nights. Finally got a couple of basic things sussed.

Here's the first of a series of images I'm gonna be posting illustrating the utility of output from terrain modelling programs (and cartographic programs such as Global Mapper) such as WorldMachine 2.0, GTS, GeoControl, Wilbur, et al.
The surfaces in the image are created from masks that are output from the terrain nodelling prog- so called image maps. The masks control the distribution of surface types such as grass, snow, etc.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/contrast.png

Enjoy!

Cheers,
monks

[Redrobes]

Monks ! Howdy - you have been away for a while.

So much to catch up on. You should post lots about TG2 and get some sexy renders up showing its new capabilities. We were looking at possibly auto-generating some of the scene files for that. I think I remember they looked hard to figure out tho - so many options !

We gotta get on and finish a full render of the base map of me-dem sometime. Its too good to leave hanging about collecting dust.

[monks]

Hey Robes, I did send an apology for my disappearance to your bluebottle address I believe a couple of weeks ago.

Hmm, yep lots to catch up on. Hey, I read the Wilbur tuts....way to go Joe with those, and rivers!
Well right now I've got the hang of image maps in TG. Next up, water. Then once I have this sussed, we can move on to GTS image maps *if* you wanna.

As I've said before, this project will never go away for me so onwards and upwards as best I can!

monks

[Redrobes]

I think bluebottle has gone to the four winds. I had to move back to the normal ones. Always best just to use the standard email addresses.

If TG2 is using image masks to do a lot of stuff then I am sure I can supply... and yes still most definitely interested in continuing with it. I dont know how high a res we can go to. I did some stuff not so long back with a lot of data and a terrabyte is very very big. I reckon if we continue then we really have to draw a line in the sand and say lets get to this point before we make it any bigger and more complex. The scale of the project was growing at a rate as fast as we could technically keep up with the ability to provide it.

I would really like to be able to get the first stage rendered. I think thats either the 20K square or 40K one. We were really close to being able to do it last time I checked. Thats still a lot of data but it is manageable.

[monks]

Here's the latest.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render03.png

I 've turned off the atmosphere to get a better look at the textures. These are the masks 'as is' output from GeoControl. I turned off all the default fractal breakup up on them in TG- I didn't want any additional noise at this point. I'm also not sure of the technicalities of the layer blending that I've used on the masks in the GeoControl renderer. If I knew those, then I could in theory simulate them in TG.
There's a problem with the river mask not meeting the banks. This *could* be because I've not textured that side of the river. That's jsut a case of swapping the masks for the full coverage ones. I'll have a run overnight. This took 7 hrs wih a quad!
Seer used a mask in his project that this is based on that wasn't included in the package he gave me. That's a blur river- so that may well correct this.
I like using image masks because you really know where everything is going to be and how it should look. What's more you know *before* you get into the render, check, change, render,check,change cycle.

I've also got a full river mask I'd lie to try.

Yeh, the first stage...I think I'm gonna get the 20K into WM and just do the Goddamn mountains at that scale. I think with image processing I'm sure we could get some nice mountains from that at 40K. If you look at what Joe's done on the Wilbur pages, you can see that it's certainly possible.
However, I won't stop there. It'll be back into Global Mapper for the proper mountains at say 40K res. But that can wait.
Howard Zhou is bringing his plugins into line with WM 2.o which is great news. That workflow that I used for the Mistys of using real terrain as vectors will then be possible.

monks

[Redrobes]

The mountain looks great. The lighting on it especially is excellent and it feels big. Much bigger than I could ever get out of mine. The river is a bit mirror like but I know TG does amazing water so I guess its just a few parameter twiddling.

7hrs is a long time. This is Mindol which is a 4x4 set. So that would mean doing another 400 like this ! Whew

Let me know what you want from me at any time. I was trying to ditch the random mountains in the make file last time I was doing stuff. I wanted to get to the point where I could render any of the tiles within the 80x80 set. Then it would be a case of sending every spare CPU cycle at generating them all.

[monks]

Hmm, the mountain looks good but it could look a lot better. I've not got the glaciers in at all and the specularity on the snow is not there. There is also a skirt of grey which is not covered by any of the image maps- an oversight- but a proc layer will sort that out.
Like you say the water just needs some tweaking- it's set at default at the mo. I'm trying to get in touch with Seer but his old email is bouncing so I've sent some pms out. I think now that the image maps are pretty much sussed, the water is really the big thing- especially for GTS because it really excels at that; including glaciers and snow

I think the GTS output will look ravishing in TG. I'm gonna suss the water in TG do some nice renders and then I can think about the big run.

monks

[hubbardmapworks]

in-freakin-credible.
looks amazing.

[Redrobes]

Yeah I almost live on this site....

The Me-Dem project is still running but what basically happened is that when we had a more active forum the technical difficulty got higher and higher until there were about 4 of us doing stuff and then the site got hacked and it languished in a hacked state while we waited for the webmaster to get a reboot. We got that but it was insecure so was hacked again. All out of our hands really. Then we got an upgrade about middle of last year which gave us the forum back again but there are no images loaded into the archive. So we lost all the guests and basically on a small handful of people resigned up.

At mo I am still in touch with Monks who does add a little more now and again and who does the DEM side of the map. I do the resolution upscale and procedural coloring based on climate maps that are defined, so I dont do any mapping of it whatsoever. For me its more about the tools to enable us to get to the next technical level with it all. I modified by terrain making app to cover some of the requirements of this project and renamed it GeoTerSys which is in my sig. I should mention before anyone else asks that its not a released app - its fearfully hard to drive. Monks runs some 3D views from Global Mapper or Worldmachine. Seer Blue is also a little involved tho I think his main PC failed some time back and has been quieter since then and SuLiam is one of the more stalwart passive observers.

So technically its not abandoned but its not going forward very fast at this point either. Sort of arthritic snail pace. You can post onto its forum and I think we still get notifications tho its been so long that anyone has I cant remember if it still works. We generally private mail between us now. Monks has a MySpace page with some pics on it too which I reckon is about as up to date as it gets tho he is busy with his band which is doing better and more active than the map

I think that Tolkien Enterprises should capitalize on their IP but this is a non profit, non money making thing. You sign up for free and Monks gives it out. There's no sales based on any of this stuff. Its just a fan based bit of fun really. Most people including me don't have Global Mapper to add to the data set or use it in native form. It normally has to be converted to something more common most of the time. If they yanked it then it would be a loss for everyone including them. If the project got somebody who wanted to use it for something bigger and commercial then I think we'd be onto T.E for a licensing deal. I don't think any of us are intending to go that route or seek it out tho. Were just happy to play with it as and when. Any sort of licensing deal is never going to happen if its just yanked off the face of the internet tho so why do it. But then I can never understand half of the decisions that lead companies to fail.

[monks]

Hellooo If you register on ME-DEM, I'll be able to give you the data for a dem via ftp.
I'm testing World Machine 2.2 right now, so I'm back with things a little, but not modelling at the moment.

A chap contacted me via email over Christmas...was that anyone on here? I've yet to reply but I do intend to soon.

monks