Middle Earth DEM Project

Yeah, GeoTIFF is fine. as it's an acceptable input format for 3DEM. Once it's in 3DEM I select the area I plan to make the terrain from using a tool within 3DEM. That selection is an area (x*256) * (y*256) in size. 3DEM then crops the data and exports it as a binary file, which I then convert into a .trn file readable by the landscape editor. The landscape editor then slices things up into sections I can bring into Terragen for rendering purposes (I'll be rendering at 4096x4096) and also gives me a heightmap which I can use to make my topop map. It's complicated, but it should work. So, since the cropping is done in 3DEM, it doesn't matter if my input data is square or not, or even a multiple of 256 or not.

I do have to ask if I'll be able to edit the terrain data at all prior to importation to 3DEM; I'm thinking it might be necessary to go through and create a few flat areas for airfields and whatnot, in likely locations. However, information leads me to believe that editing GeoTIFF data in photoshop will cause the loss of the relevant metadata.

And yes, 3DEM is freely available; we have a version of it that's been tweaked a little for our purposes. I can get you the link if you'd like.

I am currently wondering whether or not the area I want to model is going to fit within the limits of the landscape editor; there's a hard limit on terrain size (a maximum of 600 Terragen tiles, so 30x20, with each tile being 24km on a side). If it doesn't fit; I'll figure out what area to focus on.

NoXylophone wrote:

The way I think I'm going to do it is start with a map of all of Mordor at maybe 20k pixels by 30k pixels (or some convenient multiple of 256 close to those numbers). Bring the heightmaps output by the Landscape Editor in and my terragen renders and create a topo map with elevation contours and the like. Then break out the tablet and start painting onto the topo map, defining large-scale areas of different texture types (ash plains, bare rock, volcanic desert, lowlands, highlands, etc, etc, etc), and define major things like roads, rivers, lakes, lava flows, and so forth. Also go over the terrain with a basic color palette paintjob to transition between Gorgoroth, Nurn, and so forth, so color tints are consistent. I should also be able to paint the thermal and forest maps at that resolution.

Then I'll slice up that image into it's constituent tiles and use them as sort of a paint-by-numbers guide for the high resolution textures. With terrain contours I'll be able to find flatlands easily enough, figure out where rock strata would start and stop, that sort of thing. Then add the fine details, and voila.

In a sense thats exactly what were already doing except that we have it done automatically for some of the texture maps. We use masks and many of them and we generate a whole lot more automatically. For example, Monks has set up layers in GM for different types of vegetation or areas where its volcanic or where it dry etc. We have made a temperature map and combined loads of maps into a vegetation bias map.

Then we run the terrain through my GeoTerSys which is a terrain simulator app and that grows vegetation in the right place, calculates the temperature from the base plus the altitude adds in a little from the sun angle, does a bit more from glacial flow and so on. Then it outputs a set of greyscale masks for the resulting temperature, vegetation etc

Then I have this app I have written which takes in seamless textures like those from genetica and blends them all together using rules to produce the final texture map. The rules use masks and textures plus defined graphs. So we might say add in vegetation where its wetter than X but not so wet as to be Y, more than 3 m above sea level, and at least 2 deg C but not as high as 30. Then the next rule could be put in water where its above sea level, wetter than X and more than 0 deg C. We have a rule which is something like put in steam where its wetter than X and the temperature is more than 100 degC as well. We have loads of these. We have three different types of sand on the beach with sea weed at high tide, surf on the water and dune grass behind it and so on.

So from that point of view we have some good textures for it already. What we dont have is much in the way of towns, buildings etc - what you have called the fine details. We dont have rock strata but if you can paint the mask then we could texture the strata by using an extra texture and an extra rule.

Have you looked at the galleries ? Check the GTS one...

me-dem.me.uk/galleries/gts/gallery.htm
and a pics like this
me-dem.me.uk/galleries/gts/3DTexDemo013.png

We have the whole terrain in this kind of texture. If you go to the ViewingDale gallery then this is another app I write which is a terrain viewer with zoom capability. You can zoom down to that previous pictures sort of scale in 2D.

me-dem.me.uk/galleries/vdale/gallery_htm..._ViewingDale_jpg.htm

But if you had the height maps and this texture then you could do this with your flight sim in 3D. Right now this Outerra is amazing as a kind of flight sim with its fractalizing close up height but it does not support the loading of arbitrary colour textures. So the images you get from that are amazing in some ways and limited in style in others. For example we cant force it to make the trees for Lorien or Fangorn etc. It puts trees where it likes including in the middle of Mordor.

So maybe we could save you a whole heap of work in some ways and get you a set of masks for the terrain and a set of existing texture maps and maybe you could concentrate on what bits are missing from our textures and provide the extra masks to get the bits were lacking. The issue for us is that its 40,000 pixels square which I would consider too much work to hand texture.

Yes, I thought of giving Patrick a few texture maps output from World Machine too. The more sources and choices for layers you have, the better.

30x 24 km = 720 Km.
20 x 24 = = 480 km.

The current Mordor area is approx 1100 x 740 Km. Yes, that's going to be a problem. That's a shame. uhmm, there's no way to make it smaller without losing the southern section south of Nurn. You could lose most of the west and the eastern edges. I'd suggest going back to the pic you posted and reselecting based on those figures. I'd suggest keeping the north western area around Udun and Mt Doom.The mountains are really steep pretty much eveywhere, so you'd get a lot of uplift.

The other option is to do is at half ground extents, but if you're looking for realism, that's obviously not ideal.

Ultimately, I can give you Mordor at approx 33k x 22k if you want. It'll be 32 m/px. The terrain will be at triple res, so 3 x (11106 x 7412). I export at 16m res, but the export is always twice the actual res because we store our data at half res. So, 32m is what you'll be at.

Hmmm, Wilbur the only free app that could let you do the edits but it doesn't support Geotiffs. If I give you the initial dem as a png, you can do some editing in Photoshop. Send it me back via the ftp, and I'll re-rectify it, and export as geotiff tiles @ the higher res.
I've been uploading the tiles overnight but as you say you're locked out from any edits. Obviously you'll want to create masks from any edits you do and send me those too if you want them with georeff info and at full res. I'll certainly need them to avoid eroding the air strips! You'll need the ftp info. I hope I still have the darn password.

Re: masks. I can do the following:
flow map
wear
deposition

roads
rivers
forests (there are those west of the Ephel Duath)
locations of volcanic hotspots
even cwntres of population if you wanted: towns, ruins.

That's a lot of data but then the masks could easily be genned as 8 bit greys which will save your system. I could also gen them at a lower res for use in the Scene Editor, depending on how you intend to create the features. If you'll be creating the roads for eg, by hand in the Scene editor, then you could use lower res masks as a visual guide. If you're creating them procedurally from the masks then you'll really want the roads at least, at full res. I don't know if it supports masks- I'm guessing surely it must do. It's up to you anyhow.

monks

I hadn't seen those GeoTerSys renders. That's pretty impressive, and very intriguing.

I've got access to a whole suite of tutorials on how to calibrate terrains to textures that already exist. It's done for the purposes of creating scenery from satellite photos of real terrain; but those techniques *could* be adjusted to index these kinds of renders against the terrain. It's really no different. That *would* save a ton of work, and it would go quite a ways towards, well, just about every process.

Combined with a bit of artistry in photoshop to really bring the textures to life, and add some detail and interest to the scenery, that would be a great approach. Or at least for use as masks on other textures.

The reason this idea intrigues me so much is that this is basically an unknown land. The idea of flying through it in a realistic simulator, especially one that is as intimate as a gliding simulator, really fascinates me, and is exciting. Keeping a glider aloft really really requires you to examine, understand and be conscious of the environment; the terrain especially. But part of the motivation of doing that is not just the challenge of gaining access to a difficult part of the landscape or staying aloft for a long period of time, but also of there being things to discover and sights to see. Now, obviously, one of the things that does that is variance in terrain. Mordor is obviously a volcanic wasteland (one of my favorite types of environment; Iceland is pretty much my favorite place on Earth), but that doesn't mean there can't be some interesting things to discover. Some of these are going to be naturally occurring (there are some cliffs and canyons on the mesh that look amazing and I can't wait to fly in), but some of them should, I feel, be placed intelligently. For example, maybe somewhere the mountainsides have been carved away as in a quarry, or there's a geothermal lake in the middle of a sulfur flat, or that kind of thing. Things that aren't going to show up in the procedural generation process.

I think that combining the two approaches is a really good idea, and will lead to the most satisfactory result. I was planning on using Terragen to help accomplish the basic landscape/landclass assignments as kind of a basic map, but these renders you showed me are much more intelligent, and can account for a ton of variables. If you guys don't mind doing the rendering, I'd be happy to incorporate that technology into the project. I'm not exactly sure what I'd be able to put back into the project other than the finished product itself, though I suppose if I'm going over the terrain with a fine-toothed comb I'll be able to learn quite a bit about it, and might have ideas that aren't apparent to me at the moment.

In regards to the scaling; hmm. You're right that shrinking it wouldn't be good for realism, though I suppose we're working with some flexible ideas of what reality is here to being with.

A few days ago I did this: photos.napalm.net/clubsi/mordorDEM2.jpg

Which is scaled to match the terrain tiles that Condor will use at 256x256, 30x20 tiles, or 740km x 480km. The thing is, I'm not sure how that scales with your actual dimensions on the terrain. If you say Mordor is 1100km long, that's a pretty hefty scale difference.

Given that; I see two options. Break up the scenery into parts and do more than one (a task that I think likely overambitious) or pick the most interesting area and leave out the rest. To be honest, the best thing I think to do would actually be to just do the western half. Pick a height for the terrain that's big enough to get the full length of the Ephel Duath's western branch, and then just go inland as far as possible. Doing that we should be able to get all of Gorgoroth, the important parts of the Ered Lithui, and a fair amount of Nurn. Of course, as one might expect to occur in this kind of a bind, I think some of the most interesting looking terrain is in the eastern half of the map (that sort of ridged sub-range of the Ephel Duath looks amazing to me), but, well, what can you do?

Thoughts?

Hehe...binds?...oh tell about it. This project has had a lot of those along the way. I mean, terrain size has always been a problem from the outset, and it still needs to be bigger!

From that pic, I seem to remember I (arbitrarily) rescaled those uploads to more manageable sizes, so they're not at 100m res. I've looked at the core data and it is around 1100 east-west, as the map is 4000 km across. I can try cut an area which stays within those limits. The inclusion of the Anduin vale on thw west edge doesn't help but then you want something with which to contrast Mordor with and fly from. I think we should certainly cut off the White mts because they're currently being redone with the new process anyway.

Fire us those links btw to the tuts and the app. The whole process of texturing is something I'd be keen to learn more about, especially regards photorealistic textures.
I think eventually we'll have a very powerful system when we hook up GTS output to drive TG2. No doubt there'll be lots of unforeseen problems along the way too, but that's the end goal.

monks