Terrain from real world locations

#1 www.deckersds.com/endeavor

;)

#2 Someone do Charleston, SC or the Omaha, NE. :-)

#3 The U.S., always the blooming U.S.! Pfffffft. *chuckle*

I love this idea. I briefly tried to do something similar, but the end result was pretty poor due to the tiling. I'm hoping to revisit my efforts someday and maybe produce a map that doesn't have tiling (scale=1?).

#4 there are DEMs for the entire world....I just happen to know where to get US DEM's very easily.

#5 Anyway you could create a resource with some links. Are dem files free?

This might be perfect for those making projects with real world settings.

#6 http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/

#7 Has anyone actually tried this and gotten it to work? Our plan is to try this for San Francisco, but we'r enot going to get far enough in the development of our project to start for a month or two.

Minako

#8 It works just fine, but you need to keep in mind that its just terrain elevation data.

When it comes to putting content on top of that, you're on your own. Also you need to keep scale in mind. The average size of a Torque terrain is much smaller overall than the area covered by these elevation maps (depending upon the resolution of the maps, of course, they do vary, you can find more information on their sizing on the usgs site), so you'll need to set up some sort of chunking mechanism or do some manual scaling of content to make everything match up.

#9 Hey guy's. I am very very new at this. I am thinking about making a game that has a terrain from a real world location. (My home Island in the Faroe Islands)

The real place has big mountains and water - I am looking for a tutorial that can help me to get startet.

How do i realize this....what software could I use and so on.

Sorry if my question is trivial.

Regards
Johan

#10 This really is an excellent idea.

The problem is that outside of the US, it is hard to get high-resolution maps of elevation. However, within the US you can get high-quality heightmaps.

One previous poster mentioned that either the scaling would be way off, or you might have to carve the elevation up into a grid of smaller peices, but that this would be tough since the terrain tiles.

Might I suggest this resource? www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=183

It's pretty cool; the idea is that you have a grid of x by y TERRAINS, and it is that grid that tiles. So there's still infinitely repeating terrain, but it can be of a much larger, more detailed area.

#11 I found a website that offers to take satellite
pictures of real locations:
(check out the site it is cool)

http://www.spaceimaging.com/products/digital_terain_models.htm

They also offer Digital Terrain models. (DTM) Is it easy to import this pictures and make it to a 3D world in the torque game engine? Have any of you been working with somthing like this? and where are the problems?

Thanks for a good forum
Danjal Johan

#12 Actually, all you need is a greyscale bitmap to generate the terrain you want.

#13 you can find some tutorial in
http://holodeck.st.usm.edu/vrcomputing/vrc_t/tutorials/

about creating terrain and putting it to work in TGA.

#14 Here is a quick tutorial on how to get DEM files into Torque. You will need the following programs to do this. Bryce 5 and photoshop or equivilent.

Go to http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/ and locate the DEMS you wish to use. You may find an alternate source if you wish but this works for me.

I use the ftp via graphics link and select the areas for download I want to use.

Download them and unzip them (I used winrar).

Once unzipped you can import them directly into Bryce 5 using the import object in the file menu.

Once it is done importing in your viewport click on the little e button to edit object which will take you to a gray contour map of the terrain you just loaded. click on the little down arrow on the top right of the preview window. Change the resolution to 512 x 512 move your mouse out of the way and press alt-prtscn button on your keyboard.

open paint program and paste new document (in photoshop alt-n for a new image that is same size as your printscreen then ctrl-v to paste the screenshot into photoshop).

At this point you should crop the terrain out of the image (be exact using zoom, you can create a selection that is 512 x 512 to make it easier).

At this point you have some choices to make. I am using this technique to use with terrain manager so I want to make sure my maps have perfect seams. If you are using the repeat feature of the basic terrain engine then you need to make the edges black so when the terrain tiles it lines up properly.

For those using terrain manager, you can go a couple different ways here depending on whether you want to scale exactly or not. You could just resize the 512 x 512 to 256 x 256 and import it. You could break the 512 x 512 into 4 256 x 256 files for four maps. It is really up to you. I have not done any scale calculations yet. The DEMs I downloaded are at a scale of 1:250,000. I have yet to wrap my head around the math to figure out how this would translate to torque for real life scale. Once I do I will post it (feel free to post it here if you already have it figured out)

Once you are down to 256 x 256 tiles you can save as png-8 files to the common/editor/heightscripts directory - create it if you dont have it already.

I know this tut is rough but should be helpful to those are looking how to do this. If you have other methods or some alternate ways I would love to hear about them.

I am also interested in learning more about the squaresize feature of terrains and how this affects the texture quality and the map size/scale...if anyone knows about this or where a good explanation is hiding please share it.

Thanks.

#15 Desmond Fletcher has a nice tutorial on this at his site[1]. According to him, "the default size for a terrain in Torque (when the squareSize parameter in the mission file equals 8) is 65536 world units (WU). One WU in Torque is equal to one unit in the QuArK or WorldCraft map editors. A WU is equal to one inch."

Greger.

[1] holodeck.st.usm.edu/vrcomputing/vrc_t/tutorials/terrain/heightfields.shtml

#16 Hello.

I have scanned a map af my island, Suduroy. Is it possible to change this map into a detail grayscale picture ? What software could I use is it possible.

The picture is on the web: www.famjin.com/suduroy.jpg

Thanks alot
Danjal

#17 The USGS Seamless site is also a good place to go. I believe they use newer datasets (using the NED datasets instead of the older DEMs) that will probably provide more detailed and accurate information:

http://seamless.usgs.gov

Their heightmaps are in a 32 bit GeoTIFF format, so you might need a utility to actually view/export them to something you can use (i.e., the native GeoTIFFs they send out can't be used by Photoshop). There's a utility called Hypercube that you can use for that:

http://www.tec.army.mil/Hypercube/

#18 I think it may be worth mentioning that someone did this with a tribes 2 map, with some fairly impressive results. You can see the map in question here: http://tribes2maps.com/map_detail.php?id=2499

I've also heard something about the shader engine being able to handle far larger terrain sizes... wasn't there that one screenshot of a real life volcano in the snapshots?

#19 Here's another way to
generate real terrain from GIS data, using all free tools.

I'm gonna have to look up Seamless and Hypercube.

#20 @Ian: Yes, one of the eariler TSE dev shots was a demo of Mt. Saint Hellens. Not only did that shot demo very detailed terrain, but the view distance was 10km I think.