Middle Earth DEM Project

Hmmm, not sure why it isn't showing. The forum doesn't really like you posting too many images- not sure.

monks

Apparently it didn't like my links to the Genetica texture packs. I fixed it.

So I think that the best method for data transfer would be in the form of a GeoTIFF DRM height map at 3 arc-second resolution, if you have that available. Or .hgt files if you have those. O_O Like I said, I'm not exactly sure what my options are re: file types.

photos.napalm.net/clubsi/MordorDEM.jpg

That's about the area I was thinking, though I might want to include Nen Hithoel.

Hi NoXylophone,

Cool posts. I lost my board notification email so Monks had to poke me about this. Yeah looks great. Your textures are excellent.

I have been up in a glider quite a few times - about 10 or so and its an amazing sport. I have only ever done the flight experience stuff and did a little glider training but it was all years ago. Still, I think its the most fabulous feeling esp when you turn with the wind and it drops to almost silence. I flew in some old open canopy types as well so its like you, 10mm of plywood and a few thousand meters. If I recall correctly I didn't have a chute since they said it wouldn't open in time anyway so there's no point in taking one. I also liked it doing the -1G pull up and over. If your not used to that then its very very odd feeling. I flew a small plane once for a couple of minutes too and I didn't like that much at all - well alright but boring. Gliders are like 10x more fun.

Anyways, I don't have much to add more than Monks can provide. I can get the make system to generate BT, PNG16 grey or RAW float in bin files at the drop of a hat. All in tiles of 1024 square. Our issues are that the terrain is so big we need to tile it up. Don't know what tiles you use but we have arrays of 1024 tiles. We have the capacity to cut a new tile set of any size tiles (within some memory limiting conditions). Our terrain is in some kind of transitional state at the mo tho so some areas have broken mountains. We could supply some demo areas tho which are in a better state. Mordor I think is better than the rest right now.

Redrobes

Btw. I'll warn you if you're posting a long post this board can log you out before you've finished, and you'll lose it.

We've got some more galleries here btw:
www.me-dem.me.uk/

The dem is at 100m res. You don't need to worry about the formatting. I can get it to you in any format that Global Mapper supports because all of the terrain goes back into Global Mapper rectified to position. Currently our Global Mapper
data isn't georeffed to the correct position on Earth's surface- it is somewhere in Africa right now - ie UTM Zone 31 N. We do have the coords for correct positioning but we've not been using those for a while- we've no need yet, even for Outerra. UTM 31 gives a good undistorted view of the data. You won't need them either I imagine. We use Hobbiton = Sarehole, Birmingham, UK, Minas Tirith = Florence, Italy as Tolkien stated in his letters.
The only minor problem we have is exporting as a square dem. It isn't always possible because of the distortions and the way Global Mapper handles things, but the dem can be resampled after export, so that solves that. You seem ok with a non square extents, so it's not an issue.

The Southern arm of the Ephel Duath I thought was the weakest in terms of what I was aiming for, but I'm kind of glad I left them like they are because it adds a bit more variety to the landscape. You'll be able to see better anyway once you open it up. I still think the interior mountains need a bit of flattening. There should be more plain in the interior. I've postponed that. Also, I really wanted to model the terrain around the rivers flowing into the Sea of Nurn, but that was a bit too complicated with the process I was using. It's defintely doable though. I'd just use a filter of some kind against the
river mask with falloff. So eventually we'll have those river defined by terrain around them, rather than obliterating them as they are now.
I did try to insert the ravine that Frodo and Sam walk up in the western arm of the Ephel Duath.At the scale I was working I wasn't completely satisfied with it, but you might be able to spot it I did try model the stone he tripped up
on too in Chapter 45 lol

Aha, I've briefly looked at Genetica. The rocky terrain textures in there look pretty much perfect with some tweaking. Lots of options. Yes, the second texture is superb. The Czech 2.0 scenery is one of the better vids I saw. The process
you're describing is pretty much what I'd do if I was doing it manually.

Regards texturing roads, etc, it depends on what res you'll be working at. I can get the terrain to you at a higher res, but even at double res they wouldn't show up. I think you'd be able to improve on them though because I've not tuned
them to the most current terrain. If you had renderer features that could create them at runtime I could get you road masks. Maybe you could use them in the scene editor. Well no doubt you'll be creating them in the Scene editor anyway...Outerra uses vectors for pretty much everything which is ideal for us. They're just beginning to put some land class features in now. At the moment though we can't place things ourself.

Haha...no airfields in Mordor...hmmm. A dragon runway on top of a sorcerers tower would be sweet.

Yeh, as you can imagine I've pretty much got all the relevant Tolkien refs here too. I've also got the Iron Crown Enterprises Middle-Earth roleplaying material too. It's not official Tolkien, but they did make some good contributions.
Fonstad and Strachey too.

What I'll do is crop the quad, run it through World Machine to gen some maps. Re-rectify them and then export a gereffed suitable format.Feel free to start a thread on here for your progress. A copy of the texture when it's finished would be nice. We're not in a position to use it in Outerra, but it'd be cool to open it up with the terrain for some pics and to fly around it in World Machine Explorer.

monks

The best thing I think is going to be an (as close as possible) orthographic heightmap at the highest res you can manage, within reason; I'll then use photoshop to scale it to match condor's native heightmap resolution (which is 3 arc-seconds per pixel). Of course, scaling down is better than scaling up! This is also the easiest format to transfer I think, because it's relatively compact.

If it's tiled, that's fine, I can stitch it together manually and then look for seams, etc. Our mesh generator also looks for and patches any holes or errors in the data before exporting. Actually I think tiles might come in handy during the texturing stages for elevation-based masking.

The fact that you have it close to the equator is *perfect*. That means the conversion to UTM will be simple and painless without much distortion. I'm pretty sure that Condor requires I go through a UTM conversion as part of preparing the terrain mesh; something to do with the calibration of tiles. Also it doesn't need to be square; the crop I import into Condor will have to be square, (a 2:3 rectangle probably)

Czechoslovakia 2.0 is considered the best textured scenery ever made right now. I've been PMing back and forth with the creator of that scenery as well as the creator of the two Norway sceneries (which use the same technique but have a slightly darker looking terrain) for tips and hints; they've been great. The wonderful thing about the gliding community in general is that no one seems to hoard knowledge, everyone is always happy to teach and share. Unless they're racing you of course... *laugh*

As far as roads, well... the high res textures use a resolution of 4096x4096 pixels for texturing each terragen tile outputted by the Landscape Editor. Each tile is a bit under 24km x 24km, so that works out to a little over 5 meters per pixel. So, a footpath is going to be one pixel wide. A major road might be two, and the kind of thing you'd march an army down would be 3 or 4. I do have the option of texturing at 8192x8192, but I'm not sure my computer will like me very much if I do that, and I'm not sure if anyone else will either... though I can always do the traditional game-development trick of texturing at very high res and then downsampling.

A roads mask might be helpful, though I think that what will be best is just looking at the terrain and using logic and imagination for the stuff that's not marked on major maps, and then making sure the major roads indicated on the maps are present in their appropriate locations. Same for rivers (or "rivers" as they might have in Mordor).

Now regarding changes to the terrain. I kind of like the jagged look on the plateau of Gorgoroth; I'm imagining coarse-grained ash-filled valleys with black basalt shards sticking up in the form of the ridges. Going down off the plateau is a bit jagged, but it looks like there are erosion courseways that head south to the sea. If you want to smooth that area out a bit or add more erosion, that's totally fine.

Oh, umm, how tall are the mountains in each of the ranges? I think I read somewhere that they're around 16,000 feet at the highest? I guess I'm wondering if they're more like the Alps than the Himalayas. Also, are there any other volcanic peaks in the terrain other than Odoruin? I'm trying to think about the geology here a bit... whether the mountains were formed tectonically (like the Alps and Himalayas, making Odoruin and Gorgoroth kind of like a hellish Yellowstone) or volcanically (like the Cascades, where you can't go 50 miles without running into a volcano), what kind of rock strata there might be, overthrusts, that kind of thing. I mean obviously it's a land that was shaped and altered by conscious will to some extent, but I'd like to come up with some consistent rules that approximate real geologic processes, and then adapt as necessary.

I should probably give you my email address so you can get files to me a bit more privately: I can be reached at pdmoore@berkeley.edu

Anyway, I'm in finals this week. So uh, it'd probably be better if you *didn't* send me the data until Friday or so, or I'll end up hopelessly distracted. *laugh*

-Patrick