Middle Earth DEM Project

[Redrobes]

Nope - none that I can see. Must be pretty subtle and if that saves it crashing then go with it I say !

Y'know I have been wracking my brains trying to think why I am familiar with Dmytry and using some serious google fu and then it occurred to me to check - he was with us on the TS boards a while back wasn't he. I feel better now. That was doing my nut. Yeah his work is very cool. Is Pandromeda and Pandemic tied together cos his stuff looks just like something I was given to play with a while back as a company demo - well anyway thats beside the point.

[monks]

just tinkering tonight. Tomorrow on with the meat of it...more pics in the links.
the rivers don't quite line up with the terrain in some places at the moment; just a matter of importing the updated river data.



http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...screenie08.png









http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...nCurunir02.png

http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...ollshaws05.png

http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...arth/Wold2.png

http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...arth/Wold3.png





monks

[monks]

correcting the rivers...compared to the one above



monks

[Redrobes]

correcting the rivers...compared to the one above

Cool stuff. It was trollshaws05 that had the oddest rivers in it tho Will comment more later...

[monks]

Thanks Steel General. We need all the encouragement we can get haha. We appreciate all support!

Robes, I'm doing the western flank today so they'll be sorted.

monks

[Redrobes]

Quick Q, Are you moving the terrain to fit the rivers or moving rivers. I.e. are my rivers still correct ?

[Steel General]

I know I've said this before, but this is some really cool stuff you're doing.

[Steel General]

It's pretty damn amazing at this point!

[SeerBlue]

RR, you must be a mind reader, I was just thinking that what we need is a handy app that will convert from one heightfield format to another without alot of intermediate steps, and keep the file as it was...especially for going from ter (terragen) to hfz for Global Mapper,,,, GM wont load ter files, but it will write them, but, of course, in GM one can make some really nice altitude controlled shaded maps, digitized shaded maps, and export at any size imaginable, tiled for Google Maps even.
To get a ter into GM I run it through Leveller, set the export options, write down the altitude and lat long extents, and export it to dem,,,,then hopefully remember which way is north upon opening it in GM or I end up with Carn Dum being where Edoras should be and Saruman wonders who he got so far north.... TG can be used to add heightfield detail as well, controlled by altitude, slope or shader, and the new terrain exported, but then I have to go back through leveller to get it to dem format for GM,,,,a simple read write TER to HFZ would be great, less chance for caffeine induced teleportation.
Why I like GM ,,, one can use the same heightfield to pop out a variety of maps, and if exported with hillshade lighting disabled the colored maps can be used as layers in Gimp or Photoshop to build up exactly the map one wants,,,i disable hillshading as it ends up getting too dark as multiple layers are added to blend in colors,,,, the only problem with altitude controlled shaders, is that they apply to the whole map giving the whole "world" the same color scheme, but run a few different shader setups and blend away in gimp or photoshop to get a more varied world.
SeerBlue

[Redrobes]

My GTS works in HF2 and image type formats (JPG,PNG etc). I have resisted putting in zillions of format conversions into that app as it could go on and on - a bit like GM's specs. So what I do is write these tiny command line apps to do the conversions - sorta everything to HF2 and HF2 to everything so as to keep HF2 as the main format that I use.

So I have a mini command line app called BTtoHF2.exe and it takes in the final size and offset as well as input and output. So we can take one of Monks 10004 sized height maps in .ter run through Wilbur to get a BT and then I can go from this to HF2 and offset it into a 10240 sized tile at the same time.

The version of Wilbur I have does not have hf2 in it. I think last time I used L3DT to go BT to HF2 but I have lost my L3DT now. A TER to HF2 would also be a useful little app but for now I dont need it. Can you get away with a BT to HF2 in the same way.

Ultimately it would be excellent for me to output a series of greyscale maps for all the processing from GTS and get that into a TG2 run. But I think this time around I am going to use my texture compositor to do that job and create a bitmap which will look a lot like my CWBP tiles since its using the same set of textures and graphs. It will do lighting, shadows and so on and all the types of vegetation, water, snow etc but not in the nice procedural way that TG2 can. At this scale it wouldnt matter but it would be good to be able to go down to person level and render views out with procedural rocks, trees and clouds etc.

I ran it through last night whilst I was out and it did the snow and water, plus it fixed up the lighting but it was a land sprayed with DDT. No veg. Only after did I notice that it was failing to load the Veg map in due to me putting the wrong name of file in. So ill do another run today too.

On a little test after that it looked like igneous rock areas was causing some problem with the temperature going off the scale for some bizarre reason. That looks like a bug which I need to fix before proceeding with it to the end. Its probably loosing float precision. Still, should have something a lot better by end of today.