# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > General and Miscellaneous Mapping >  Middle Earth DEM Project

## monks

Hi, monks from ME-DEM here.

 This is a series of zooms taken in World Machine Pro 2.0 beta's Explorer mode (in which you get to fly about your terrain!). The terrain is the Misty Mountains from J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (modelled for the ME-DEM Project):
http://www.me-dem.org/component/opti...page/Itemid,1/

 It's kinda modelled on the European Alps via networks of ridges and valleys.

The first zoom is rough but this should give you a sense of the scale of this range. It's around the same length as the Alps as it happens. Imagine the areas around the range fully modelled, hills, river courses, forests, etc
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../WMZoom_01.png

In the next shot we start to see the macro structure. I've still some work to do on those- such as making certain areas higher in elevation than others- not just differentiating elevation along networks. The area around Moria (Caradhras, et al) will be more discernible as a bulge.
 Also, getting the river valleys and rivers to flow naturally into the surrounding and will really help knit the terrain scene together-. Control over river flow is one of the aims.
 The eastern flank (top) should rise dramatically from the plain. The western slopes will tumble down more gradually by way of the Ettenmoors, Trollshaws, etc.

 The flat area to the north going off screen is the area prepped for the Grey Mts, ...here be dragons. :Exclamation: 

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../WMZoom_02.png


As you can see the valleys tend to be a uniform altitude which is wrong really- that's next on the list: finish off valleys.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../WMZoom_03.png


This is a nice area.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../WMZoom_04.png


Coming in to land!

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../WMZoom_05.png

The aim is to integrate this terrain into a huge map. Hope you like!  :Smile: 
Merry Crimbo!

monks

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## mmmmmpig

what is the pixe resolution (10m right now?) that you are aiming for and are you going after a LANDSAT feel or an Iconos?  I am REALLY interested in how this is going!

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## monks

To be honest, I wouldn't know the difference between the two. The terrain is fed through procedural erosion so any of the finer characteristics will be largely replaced anyway. The macro scale features, such as fractal mt range forms, will be preserved- that's something that procedural terrain modellers do very poorly (if at all).

10m, I wish! we are currently at 200m res- but that's the whole NW of M-E. The aim is to get down to around 25m using a set of apps written by RedRobes (member here). That's probably going to mid 08.
 We've also got other routes we're looking at- using procedural zooms, etc. We'd like to get to about 2m res for an interactive terrain probably using Ogre. We're hoping to serve the terrain on NASA's WorldWind and get it into Viewing Dale.

 We will be doing sections of the terrain as closeups as well for renders, there's always something going on, - so the Misty Mts could easily go higher res. 

 The biggest headache is managing hydrology. So far we've managed to keep the rivers in check, but it's always very difficult.



monks

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## mmmmmpig

Is this your job or is it just passion?

5 years ago I mocked up the shire using some aerials and photoshop, but during the great computer purge of 06 I lost most stuff on my work hard-drive.

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## pyrandon

These are wonderful!  I can't wait to see the progress you achieve!  

Thank you for sharing!

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## monks

Thanks!, and sorry for not responding sooner. It's a passion- and it doesn't seem to go away haha very irritating sometimes.

 Yeh, you've just summed up why I'd like the ME-DEM project to be a persistent project. So many people have done so much great (and perhaps) overlooked and lost work pver the decades on Middle Earth. 

 Mapping the Shire will be an absolute treat. Any more info on how you mapped the Shire? Feel free to reg over at ME-dEM at get involved- the site's undergpoing repair at he moment tho.





Here's an update on the Misty Mts terrain in World machine Pro 2.0 beta. After respanning the terrain to the correct heights I've had to re-do the river valleys, so it's taken a little longer than I expected. I've concentrated on the valleys flowing from the Misty Mts. There are others, such as the Grey Mt watersheds, but that's for a later date.

Rivers

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../Rivers_01.png


a few shots showing the Gundalok shelf just south of Mt Gundabad, and the Cold Fells on the western flank of the Misty Mts.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../Rivers_02.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../Rivers_03.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../Rivers_04.png



 The plan is to use this terrain for a GeoTerSys test run. All the other river beds will be scored by RedRobes in GTS to control the river flow across flat areas. I'd like to see this at huge res, fully textured!  :Smile:  I'm also planning some tests in Geocontrol 2.0 beta, probably on a subset of the terrain  :Smile: 

monks

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## jezelf

Hi!

This is all very cool and fascinating. Is there any progress on the Middle Earth Project?

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## Redrobes

There has been some but it has dropped off of late (past two months has been slow). This is something that I plan to get stuck into again in a very short while tho. I have just got a lot on right now and I think the other admins have also - you need a high pain threshold to work on this project as its completely nuts.

The plan is to get GTS (the terrain app I write) to process up the base map to level one and output some files which can be used to render the whole base map. The idea right now is to try to output files that might be compatible with a basic terragen scene and then try to increase the complexity as we go forward.

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## 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

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## 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.

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## 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!  :Smile: 

monks

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## 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.

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## 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

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## 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.

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## 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  :Smile: 

 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

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## meleeguy

I like it.

And therefore, I swing my mighty +1 sword of rep at you, rolling an adjusted 11.  Since you are new here, I determine your AC to be 10, so it lands.

When do we get to the fly over of helms deep?  :Smile:

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## Redrobes

> 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.


Seer was pretty active over the summer as he made up some towns and maps with his kids who became the FHCO's... Doing some grocery store work for a bit but posted recently within a week or so.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2189

For GTS masks there should be loads in the CalcTiles folder of Mindol test. There should be a complete (?) set for every colour tex render but you know we can add or change anything required. But that should provide about 10 or so per tile. If they need to be B&W only then ill have to make some new texture scripts. Or show you how easy it is to write a script to generate them.

The GTS texture creator has always been a rough cut to getting a texture. I use it all the time on here tho. TG2 should be able to do a much better job so interfacing source to tex engine would be a good idea. I was hoping Seer would be able to do much of that as he knows TG2 well.




> ...therefore, I swing my mighty +1 sword of rep at you, rolling an adjusted 11.  Since you are new here, I determine your AC to be 10, so it lands.


Yes good call. Now that the reputation amount is shown as a value I think that it needs a good clubbing in the upward direction. Given that I defer all really hard terrain questions to you then your current amount is woefully inadequate !




> When do we get to the fly over of helms deep?


For meleeguy this one. Me-Dem is about the terrain but there were (unfortunate past tense there) projects to model the buildings too. Here is the zenith of the Minas Tirith Project.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eAruygQtw8Y

Such a shame it went pear shaped.

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## monks

well I sussed the river problem- rendering now. I was using the wrong mask, good job Seer!
I got hold of him now.
 I put in some mudflats but they'll need a bit more work I expect. Hey, thinking of getting some reeds in there as well- ooh, I like this now...


Right, thanks for reminding me- I did expect we had something to run on from GTS.

 hehe- I have AC10 at mapping?- you jest surely sir!  :Wink:  I'll post some Global Mapper screenies when I get the chance- should have put some up by now. Glad you like meleeguy anyway  :Smile: 

Yeh, Minas Tirith- gutted! No share, no fair //sob //unutterable curses in their direction


monks

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## monks

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render06.png

nice...

monks

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## Redrobes

yeah real nice ! Just gotta get the water to line up with the banks. Love the clouds btw. But even the grassy plains look pretty cool too.

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## jezelf

this is one of the most exciting projects around - love all the updates! Good going guys.

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## monks

Hey jezelf, thanks for the encouragement  :Smile: 

 Robes, the water does line up with the banks!- those black things you see are the mudflats I put in  :Laughing: 
..so if I remove that surface layer, the water goes right up to the sides- looks real cool.

I'm roughening up the water a bit now and I'm going to see what this all looks like with TGs default fractal noise re-introduced to the textures. It's looking a bit table-top at the moment.

monks

ps hey guys, if you want to check out some more cool pics of the project check out my MySpace page- the pics galleries:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm...ndid=262625983

Yuo might also want to check out my music as well in the Player- hope yuo like.

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## Redrobes

> ...the water does line up with the banks!- those black things you see are the mudflats I put in 
> ..so if I remove that surface layer, the water goes right up to the sides- looks real cool.


Ahh - shuffles off  :Embarassed: 

Glad your back on the case again - we will get that final stage 1 this time.

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## Ascension

Holy frejoles!  Wish I could learn to wrap my brain around that nodule method TG2 uses.  Very nice.

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## monks

Hey Ascension- I learned via World Machine. I took to that quite well...TG is a bit different again but I'm getting there.

What do you think of the river valley texturing on the opposite bank?- do you think it looks realistic? This is another surface layer mixed via the fractal breakup. I'm goin to double the number of texture layers but I want to improve it, not just add more.
 The water has better reflectivity I think. The water level is too low though- if I raise it, it will look better, and it will also obviate the need for the mud flats...so Robes you can shuffle back in lol

I've still got a nice river mask in hand as well- should be able to improve those river valleys...and of course there's the plant populations //drool

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render09.png

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## monks

ok, the river banks east and west are not at the same heights. In order for the river to be perfect I'd have to go back and alter the western bank- get rid of those cliffs. That's not difficult at all but it is worth it for the purpose of these renders..?
 So onto the surfacing...

monks

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## Redrobes

> ...so Robes you can shuffle back in lol


Sure - never really left  :Smile:

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## monks

improved half of the surfaces here- 

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render11.bmp

now onto the mountain.
 I'd like to throw in some displacements as well to the terrain.

running off a render now of Mindol....

monks

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## monks

hmm, still needs a lot of work. Promising tho...

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render13.png

I think displacements will help as well as tree cover in the foreground running up the lower slopes.
First tho, getting more variation into the surfaces on the mt.

monks

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## monks

here's one at slightly higher detail settings:

I think the base of the mountain needs a lot of work

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render14.png


monks

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## Redrobes

Cool ! In fact everything looks just perfect except for the white lines coming down the side of the mountain. I dont know what they are supposed to be. I speculate that its mist hanging in the valleys but I am not sure.

How many and what types of image mask is this using to get this one rendered ?

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## monks

I've gone  in a different direction. Mnidolluin is supposed to be blue aftert all- the name means: 
'towering-head-blue'. I may have over egged the blue a lil bit, but this is much closer now.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render20.png

 hehe- yeah right, no the white lines were jsut a white shader so that I could see that the mask had gone in properly- nothing quite so swanky.
 I want to sue this mask to get some glaciers coming down- the snowline is just too simple here. 
 The river mask can be used to apply a water shader and I'd like to get a transition from rapids in the mts- we'll see.

 This is a good 30 shaders, but only 17 are on Mindol. How do you mean, types?
 this really needs some displacement in the lower regions and I'm thinking of applying it with an inverted flow map, that way none of the rivers are affected.

monks

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## monks

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render21.png

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## jfrazierjr

> http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render21.png



Very cool... when is the ski lift going up??

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## Steel General

That last one is just durn fantastic!

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## Redrobes

Yowzers ! Butt kickin' Nicely done.

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## monks

Thanks guys, I'm working on some displacements now...ski lift will arrive at the end because the cafe has to be built first- on the summit...lol

monks

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## jfrazierjr

> Thanks guys, I'm working on some displacements now...ski lift will arrive at the end because the cafe has to be built first- on the summit...lol
> 
> monks



Good.. I am all about me some skiing, even though I don't get to go very often.   I will hit the cafe as long as it has Rum(dark) and Cider.

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## mmmmmpig

That last one is absolutely killer

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## monks

Thanks mmmmpig!

 I've tried to put in glaciers manually in PS, but it's a problemmatic process as the snow is procedural here- as opposed to an image amp which would make it easier. So, the glaciers don't quite connect correctly with the snow flow.
 Going in the right direction tho.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render29.png

monks

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## Redrobes

Monks, do you want me to generate some glacier maps from the mountain ?

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## monks

Yeh, let's give it a try- I bet the erosion would completely alter the mountain but... so what? The only concern is that it takes too much off the height, so maybe respan the terrain to the pre-glacial heights if you know what I mean.
 I can upload the terrain to the ME-DEM ftp...I'll do that later.

monks

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## Redrobes

If you can get me the height info then I can just do the snow and glaciers and you apply that to your model so keeping the original erosion. When I move snow about I can either erode as I go or not, it makes no difference to me.

Do you want a greyscale snow depth map or a full HF2 style water height (depth) map as the result ? Also, do you want runny snow or thick viscous style or just take my best guess ? And do you want solar directional heating applied and if so what direction - like the image lighting ?

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## monks

here's the terrain I'm using:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...0bank25TER.ter

erm, I think a .ter for snow depth. I'll be using your maps for all the snow- so I'm guessing both. I'd like to see the glaciers in there- should be cool. Stick the lighting in as well as it should mix the snowline up a bit- I'd like to take some shots of the other side of mindol as well- GTS produced some pretty interesting features on that side I remember.

monks

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## Redrobes

Cool, on the go...

Just remind me, whats the peak height of Mindol and the general average temperature at ground level. I have it at about 16000ft and 18degC at mo. Thats gonna give snow about half way up as it runs at a drop of 2deg C per thousand ft.

Also, I have lost my ftp login for skindustry can you email that over at some stage as ill upload a .ter file to it later.

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## monks

ftp info in the email.

 hmm, ICE puts it at 10459 ft...but we can go with whatever we like..actually the ter has a range of 757 to 10436 ft...so try that for now.

monks

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## Redrobes

Ta for that info. I have done it now. Ran up GTS and played about - spotted a slew of obvious bugs I thought I was using an old version. They were real. Sigh...

You can find a .ter file here:
/Temp/Redrobes/MindolGlaciers

which should look like this if Wilbur has converted the file correctly (and I am confident it has).

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## meleeguy

That peak is amazing and I couldn't tell it from a real one.

The foreground drainage seems off a bit with a slight perlin pattern showing that I might be imagining.

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## monks

Cheers Robes, gonna give it a go today. I'm thinking it should be inserted as a heightfield to surface shader....That looks pretty nice- yehhhh!

  Meleeguy, this is really just a test- well I'm very much a learner with this software. There's a zillion things I'd like to do to this image...there are so many things!  :Smile: 


hey Seer, are you around? I need some help on connecting up a greyscale imagemask to define rivers. I tried connecting it to a water shader but I can't see a thing....

monks

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## monks

not sure if this correct yet but I've got some height on the flow now- but I had to use a terrain function to add height- the glaciers looked like they were painted on otherwise. This is with 60 ft of it.
 The best way to tell would be to render an area where the rock is poking through.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render32.png

monks

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## Redrobes

Yeah, Im not sure about that either. When I saved it out last night it looked like rivers with the middle of the glacier flow being quite thick filling in the groove where it was flowing so I would expect that the top of the snow to be pretty flat or slightly convex. Perhaps try more depth to it ? I dont know really.

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## su_liam

Monks, are you sure you used the right heightfield? It looks as if you have a constant displacement inside the glacier mask. Basically, it looks as if the existing valley floor has been repeated, displaced upwards.

Also, TG2 uses meters as its units, so that might be a 60 _meter_ displacement, or about 200 feet.

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## monks

Maybe Seer can shed some light on this...but I'll tinker some more...s'all good!  :Smile: 

Suliam-Yes, it looks like that to me as well- the convexity is not there. No, I converted to feet.

monks

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## monks

hmm, does this look better?

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render34.png

 I'm going to replicate the cam pos you got in your df shot Robes -see how it looks.

monks

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## Steel General

Holy poop! That looks more like a photo than a render.

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## Redrobes

Monks, I have the same view using DF. It does seem as though it was pretty thin and concave. I did cut down the viscosity to make these so maybe if I had left it higher then it would have been more bulbous and convex.

Shall I try another run ?

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## monks

I think what I have in that latest shot look pretty close to yours there but I'm noticing that I'm not getting the nice protrusions of the mountain through the snow like you have on the ridges and peaks.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...nder35crop.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...2/render37.png

 The concavity is not really a major problem. At the moment I'd like to get those protrusions. I noticed as well that this dem I'm using is corrupted- see the rear of Mindol, where has all that terrain gone? 

 Could you try another run with a little less glacier coverage and a bit more powdery snow?

monks

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## Redrobes

I have another going up now - give it quarter hour from now...

The new one is with thicker viscosity so it drops down from the sides less but is more bulbous. I have the shot of it in wilbur and you can see its got depth in the V bits.

My image is a rough guide with a quick texture calc so it would depend on the snow thickness. What I am thinking is that maybe the viscosity of the last one was so thin that it never got bulbous at all and that you applied it too thick thinking like I did that it needed to be more bulbous and convex. So it was too thick causing what was thin snow layer to become thick. Here are the shots of the new one and wilburs visual of it. This is using default gts viscosity now - I shouldn't have changed it in the first place but I was not getting any glaciers at all for a while. I found out why but it was unrelated to viscosity.

Took so long to upload those images that the FTP has finished now.

Edit -- Oh yeah, I forgot to zap the excess liquid water off the map before saving. I can do another one later though if thats an issue.

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## monks

that looks superb in df- imagine what can be done with these maps...!

I opened the last one up in Wilbur too. Everything seemed fine. I think this is almost certainly me misunderstanding the nodes in TG. I'm converting the heightmap to an image mask in Wilbur. I think I need both a heightmap and an image mask to control the surface extents...that's just one thing I'm not sure about. I think it's time to have a good chat on the TG boards about this. 
 The excess water can be removed no probs I think.

monks

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## monks

Looks like we have no bites on this one on the TG boards...so we're back to tinkering. Robes, did you upload the second glaciers you ran?

monks

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## Redrobes

Yes, same place - just called MindolGlaciers2.ter or something like that.

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## monks

Cheers, I did a wee erun last night. This looks a LOT different to the last one. I had a render coming down but Windows decided to install an update and rebooted my computer grrrr!!
 I'll try another today...

monks

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## monks

I'm currently talking to Frank B on the TG boards about the glacier terrain. Hopefully we'll sort something from that. don't see why not.

 While I was waiting fro someone to bite I've started to add vegetation in. VERY basic right now. Still gotta control placement via image mask:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_01.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_02.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_03.png


monks

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## monks

some population tests:

closeup. This is the grass clump. This is not a great model. I've got better ones than this knocking around.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_04.png

full coverage of the area

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_06.png

coverage controlled via imagemap shader.
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_07.png

monks

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## Redrobes

Y'know on test 06 the snow does look very odd - like its in places on the low lands... When I ran the glacier creation stuff I didnt put in the thermal adjustment layer for the volcanic ridge - whats that called, the one that separates Mordor. So there was Mindol on one side as a splat and a long line of snow on the other side. You haven't got the texture reversed so the line of snow is being put on Mindol ? Just a vague thought there because it shouldn't have generated snow in low lands.

The grass looks alright but its a bit uniform. Is there a way to say put a little more here and a little less here instead of the all or nothing mask. If its a B&W one only then maybe we should take GTS veg maps and create a series of bands of veg quantities out of them. Then you can put in different types of veg depending. Of course trees would look just dandy.

EDIT -- actually looking at it some more I can see its the right snow for the mountain but the mountain has been smoothed out on the right lowering it drastically from the original.

EDIT2 -- Just been reading the planetside thread. You have to remember that the ice sheet height is probably a +ve amount of height all over but its very thin in places and thicker in others - esp the flow zone - as shown in the Wilbur screenie. The point is that if your trying to get TG2 to give rock poking through then I expect that its a problem in the colour bit of it not the height bit of it. Presumably you have to set up a colour shader program for how white you want snow depending on depth. In my screenie above from DF that colour texture was generated from GTS and it uses a min snow depth before it shows any snow and then just linearly ramps up white until it reaches a preset max level. That quickie tex generator from GTS is quick and dirty. To do the snow properly in GTS you need to use the scriptable texture compositor program thing where you set the depths and the graph of colour vs depth up yourself. I expect that you will need something akin to that in TG2. So where the fluid is less than 0.1m say, just make the white amount zero  and where its 2m or something like that make the white full and expect that in between it will be rendered as thin ice in some non physics kind of way. Perhaps the actual height map with snow added is not so bad. Maybe it needs to be a little less depth on the snow that is shown in the wips above tho. I dont think you would be able to see that front edge of the snow on the mountain in the background. Just my 2p  :Wink:   Ideally we should be able to export the height GTS generated into TG2 accurately but going via .ter is not so easy for me. Does TG2 do HF2/HFZ yet ?

----------


## monks

Yeh, I mentioned this previously. I think Seer has done something with the dem. Well for now it's only a test. The better imagemaps should come from GTS anyway based on the original terrain. Exactly, the veg maps could give some very pretty results. The grass can be broken up with some fake stones. Not sure what the computational demand is of fake stones, but if it's high then there should be a way of limiting to the fov anyway- just like the veg populations. It could easily be varied procedurally in colour based on slope, altitude I'm sure. There's some heather maps in there too so that will use a different plant model; the heather will simply correspond to GTS moorland I reckon.
 The grass coverage in the last shot should actually be trees anyway.

 Had os e more feedback on the glacier. I'm trying another approach as suggested n the TG boards. No luck so far. I'm using a distribution shader instead of the image map shader for the ice- still using the terrain tho- I was querrying the need for both a terrain AND an ice mask generated from the ice terrain...seemd a bit unnecessary.



monks

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## Redrobes

Ok cool. I am not familiar with TG2 so I dont know whats in a distribution shader or whether that can deal out height and color at the same time. Your right in that it seems like it kinda could.

Keep us posted and let me know anything that I can help or push it forward with. Really want to see Mindol get some extreme TG2 goodness.

I have the height map in HF2 format. Would it help if I gave you a contour map of the fluid / snow height for a reference ?

The problem was that I had to go via PNG16 to get to ter so I lost the real world values in it.

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## Redrobes

Contour bands at 100ft intervals. I guess I let a lot of snow fall  :Smile:

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## monks

Hey Robes, just a quick update. this is two plant models using different population distributions:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_09.png

 I'm not sure what you mean in your last post...?
 I haven't made any more progress on the snow but I'll get it. I'm learning all the time here. I'm trying to get trees in at the moment- lots of texture maps to set up. It may require that the heightmap be respanned in TG. Shouldn't be too difficult at all in theory.

monks

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## Redrobes

Cool.

I guess you didn't understand about the png bit ? Well HF2 has heights in floats where the values mean real world stuff - its a calibrated format. When going to .ter I have to go HF2 -> PNG16 -> TER. By going through PNG16 the values of that format are just 16bit grey so we lose the real world calibration. I dont even know whether TER files have real world calibration but whatever, I have lost it by that point so the only way to recover that is to get a contour map of the HF2 and try to make the import height match up with what I had originally. Because GTS uses real world heights and is doing a fluid sim then its quite important that the height is the same from GTS to TG2 in order for it to look right - probably some leeway but you get the idea.

So, if you can make the import of the TER file about 600ft of snow at maximum depth then it would be about right.

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## monks

...just noticed your edit 2 on the previous post. will read that. Got a tree render coming down at the mo- just the tree haha- looking good though.

back shortly

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## monks

Right...this is making more sense now. You said that the fluid map has a little water everywhere. I'm going to try my old setup...I have used both mask that are cmpletely white- ie all snow on mountain set to max white, and shades of grey. I think I did check that the .ter icefield was zero in all places off the mountain. I did that in Wilbur. But with this new info, I'll take another look at this. 
 Basically the principle of what yuo are saying makes sense: gradation of  transparency via depth of icefield height (or an image map)- either way would work but the former is surely less complicated. You can use a cutoff in TG on the imagemap shader so that we could set all levels below say 0.1m to black, )transparent), and the rest to gradate through.

monks

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## monks

the tree. Unfortunately this crashed about 3/4 the way through.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...G2/tree_04.png

monks

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## monks

tree population:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...G2/tree_05.png

monks

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## Redrobes

Ohh yes - chewy. So will be able to put the grass in underneath or vary the tree size and do all that lovelyness too ? Wow - combined with our vegmaps these terrains will look sooo coool. Ohh presumably with the different soil types and veg types from the Fonstad maps we could get some terrific images ! Exciting again huh ?

So the basic idea is still to get GTS to gen up some basic vegetation quantity and then combine it with the lower res Fonstad & whatever else maps we can get our hands on. Then in TG2 there is a fixed shader setup where we can rename all the maps to generic tile index types like Fonstad_Conif_73_22.png -> Fonstad_Conif.png and have a directory full of them and then render out tile 73,22. Then bin all the temporary masks ready for the next one and start all over again until we have the whole place covered.

There was some consideration that the makefile & perl was going to write the XML TG2 scene setup but when I looked at it a few months back now I got the heebie jeebies. It was too darn complicated. Do you think this might still be realistic or can you do it by swapping in different tile masks into one scene and rerunning it for each tile. I think this would be easier and more manageable but what do you think ?

Wos the plan - man ?

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## monks

Ohh yes - chewy. So will be able to put the grass in underneath or vary the tree size and do all that lovelyness too ?

yes all that eezypeezy!

Wow - combined with our vegmaps these terrains will look sooo coool. Ohh presumably with the different soil types and veg types from the Fonstad maps we could get some terrific images ! Exciting again huh ?


hehe- yeh, if you look back at our work, it is cool I have to say lol. I've got lots of good plant models. 

I tried a render last night with trees and grass but when I checked this morning, it had crashed to desktop ,bummer. 


So the basic idea is still to get GTS to gen up some basic vegetation quantity and then combine it with the lower res Fonstad & whatever else maps we can get our hands on.

 Yes.

 Then in TG2 there is a fixed shader setup where we can rename all the maps to generic tile index types like Fonstad_Conif_73_22.png -> Fonstad_Conif.png and have a directory full of them and then render out tile 73,22. Then bin all the temporary masks ready for the next one and start all over again until we have the whole place covered.

 Ok, sounds good.

There was some consideration that the makefile & perl was going to write the XML TG2 scene setup but when I looked at it a few months back now I got the heebie jeebies. It was too darn complicated. Do you think this might still be realistic or can you do it by swapping in different tile masks into one scene and rerunning it for each tile. I think this would be easier and more manageable but what do you think ?


 Well see how you feel Robes. A lot of the difficulty is with sustaining enthusiasm and seeing rewards for work. The ratio has been rather towards the work I think! I would prefer more automation, but swapping out manually would be pretty straightforward for the image maps anyway. It would require that I write a check list, and go through them at each tile methodically so that I don't miss anything.
 I think if we were to automate the xml write, opening a thread on the TG boards at some point would be a good idea. Might raise the profile of GTS as well.

monks

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## Redrobes

> I would prefer more automation, but swapping out manually would be pretty straightforward for the image maps anyway. It would require that I write a check list, and go through them at each tile methodically so that I don't miss anything.
>  I think if we were to automate the xml write, opening a thread on the TG boards at some point would be a good idea. Might raise the profile of GTS as well.


Oh god no we will definitely automate it. Osh said that TG2 had a command line option to run a scene. I dont know what scene files there are in TG2 but I hope that its all wrapped up into one big file - text based preferably - xml ideally - which is how I believe it is.

We can either use the makefiles to copy in the masks and rename them and rerun the command line version, wait for the result and copy that generic render.png to render_73_22.png etc or we can write out thousands of xml files for each tile scene based on a master one which you set up and then run them all like compiling loads of files. Either way is the same kind of thing.

Either way I wouldnt expect anyone to run the program by hand 6400 times - or even 400 times if were doing a 4x4 set per run. The render times is a bit of a worry as well as it continuously crashing too. The crashing less so because we can just rerun the script and it will pick up where it left off providing it crashes cleanly. Could even provide a monitor program in the background to re-kick the script off if its not going etc.

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## monks

Oh god no we will definitely automate it. Osh said that TG2 had a command line option to run a scene.

 Yes that's right; command line.

 I think the automation would help sell GTS as well. Image maps have their naysayers (vs TG innate procedurals), but hooked up into a workflow like this, well we'll see. I think getting a procedurally noised (enhanced) image maps setup would be ideal. Not tried that yet...

Either way I wouldnt expect anyone to run the program by hand 6400 times - or even 400 times if were doing a 4x4 set per run. The render times is a bit of a worry as well as it continuously crashing too. The crashing less so because we can just rerun the script and it will pick up where it left off providing it crashes cleanly. Could even provide a monitor program in the background to re-kick the script off if its not going etc.

 I'd be crazy enough  lol! I've been running tests all day. Got 3 crashes in a row. But I've just had the first successful one. So I'm going to scale this up now. I think there was a problem with the subdivision cache- not quite sure how that works, but my latest change has solved it it seems. Trying a larger more demanding render overnight.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_14.png

monks

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## monks

This is without the total grass cover. Everything looks a bit flat, but at east we have a render.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iontest_16.png

I'm going to try this with higher detail settings now.

monks

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## Steel General

Based on the fact that I have absolutely no idea of what I'm talking about, the snow/ice/glacier? seem awfully thick - though the render itself (even without the grass) is awesome.

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## monks

hehe- no, the ice is too thick- need to make some changes. 

 The crashes were almost certainly caused by the settings I was using: render detail = 6. Apparently 2 is the highest one should ever need to go....!

 So, that's good news- hopefully can avoid crashes now. Got a repeat one coming down with detail @ 2 for comparison.

monks

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## Redrobes

Monks, head over to this thread and see GM's link and my post...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3338

 :Surprised:

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## monks

Dmytry Lavrov, yes amazing programmer. Last time I heard, one of his wee projects was a volumetric terrain editor using isosurfaces...? I heard it on the grapevine- hehe dunno if anything ever came of it.

spot the difference...

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iontest_17.png

So, it's either tackle the ice again or incorporate more veg...

monks

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## 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.

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## monks

haha yeh, he did make an appearance over there early on. hmm, I wouldn't know about Pandemic.
 I started another render last night with the grass clumps back in and it predictably crashed so I'll have to do some tests with those to see what the problem is.
 I also had another look at the ice and I still can't get it right. I tried Ben's suggestion and it doesn't work- doesn't work in my setup anyway. I'll persevere. I want to use a setup with only a heightfield rather than the ice mask as well. One can always alter the thickness via a heightfield adjust node.

monks

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## monks

2 populations of grass and a fake stones shader.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iontest_23.png

This is with 2 pops of grass, 2 fake stones ,and the trees of course:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iontest_27.png

monks

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## Redrobes

Thats pretty good. I guess it just needs more of it. More types of veg with more randomness to it to break it up as much as possible. Although it looks fake because its lacking that diversity the lighting and atmosphere, cloud and depth are really good. You can see that its really not all that far off. The new stone pattern helps a lot. I know that its probably not possible but its the uniform shades on all the leaves especially when many trees are put together that makes it into blocks of solid colour. The same with the grass too. I would imagine that it will be one heck of a complex shader when its all done tho. My worry is the same on this as when I was doing it in mine where I wonder whether the one shader is capable of multiple terrains that we shovel at it. I hope it will be tho.

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## 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

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## monks

correcting the rivers...compared to the one above



monks

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## Steel General

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

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## Redrobes

> correcting the rivers...compared to the one above


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

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## 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

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## Redrobes

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

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## monks

just sent you email regarding this  :Smile: 

monks

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## monks

Tinkering after some solid graft...rivers are done. Onwards to modelling the mountains now. Rivers over to you Robes tomorrow...






http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...enders/All.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...nders/All2.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...rs/Anduin1.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...rs/Anduin2.png


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


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...NanAngmar2.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...NanAngmar3.png


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


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion1.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion2.png



http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion4.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion5.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion6.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...s/eregion7.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...gundalok01.png


http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/m...gundalok02.png

monks

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## monks

Ok, terrain is going into World Machine today. We're aiming for a end of month deadline with this particular run so the terrain will not be the end product by any means. BUT, having said that, at least it will be a product AND I think it will pretty damn fine too.  :Smile:  onwards...!
 I should point out that this terrain has absolutely no erosion applied to it as yet. Once that goes in, terrain quality will increase dramatically.



monks

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## Redrobes

V Cool. I have been on the Veg Bias Map last night. So ill post where I am at to this point.

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## monks

woah! I love the way that we can make variation on such global scales. That's what's going to be required. Don't want to have a Middle Earth sized pool table heh...but we might get a pool table sized Middle earth with this map haha!

monks

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## SeerBlue

hey, I didn't even know this thread was active, teach me not to scroll down, won't it.
 Looking pretty dang good.
SeerBlue

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## Redrobes

Were going for a render with minimal erosion, rivers and so on. We want just something, anything which galvanizes what has been done so far. The scripts were written a while ago and Monks is just finishing off some more terrain. Once that is done then with some luck the scripts with minor tweaking will run a full render through. After that would you be able to do some insprired carto magic on them to make the web pages ? Do you have a PC with that still on it ?

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## monks

dem is up Robes...

In a spot here. The World Machine version I have is a no goer for what we want to do here. It crashes immediately upon me adding any Lines in Layout Mode. I've contacted Stephen about this (I did raise this in the WM board twice over the last couple of months but no answers) ...hopefully I can get hold of a stable release version. Preferably without forking out the 100 notes- having been an alpha-beta tester....

Not happy right now.  :Frown: 

monks

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## SeerBlue

yup,the web page app i use is MS Expression, free for students, no matter the age, so it is on the kids comp as well. And I have GM (for Google Map tiles) hidden in Carols laptop so it won't get deleted, so everything I need is available to make a gmap.....SeerBlue, off to download the dem

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## Redrobes

> dem is up Robes...


Thanks, I DL'ed it and its great but I have to find some way to convert the format. So I have decided to add BT format to GTS that way it will be simple. Coding that up now.

Shame about WM. I am not expert in these apps to advise. Hope Stephen can help soon tho. I'm guessing that your going there to get some erosion into the DEM before drawing a line underneath it. That would indeed be cool tho not abso necessary for getting to a render of it. Still, I reckon a fix for that should be found and I hope that bug has been discovered and fixed already.

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## Redrobes

> so everything I need is available to make a gmap...


Great - I am trying to get scripts and stuff up together to get a render out at 10K square. We could texture higher, which would be sensible, but the base DEM is set for 10K this time.

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## Redrobes

Ok done the BT to HF2 converter now Monks, chopped, offset and rendered it, added a pinch of seasoning and here we are.

Will look at doing the veg for it next, add some rivers and lakes and see how it pans out. Does the image look alright so far. The mountains seem to be chopped off for most of them. I had expected that since your working on them tho. The lighting is out on my render too but will fix all that in due course.

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## monks

Cool. Yep, looking good.

Ok, having to set the computer clock back in order to gain access to the World Machine betas here. Lucky I still have them. So we're good to go again now. 
I'm all excited...hehehe!!

Go with the mapping Seer. This will be a ma zing in Google maps, etc.

monks

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## Steel General

It's pretty damn amazing at this point!

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## 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

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## 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.

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## Redrobes

A bit better but that problem was obviously not to do with igneous rock and probably more to do with ice. I dont know why but its going off the -ve scale end. Will have to shove the debugger on it and see whats happening.

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## monks

sall good guys. I noticed that WM is now lining up to work with hf2- it's in the drop down list with WM dialogs- not sure if support has been implemented yt. I think Stephen has moved to Mars. 
 Finally after 3 days of piggiing about started to draw actual terrain in WM. Working on that tonight.

 I think we should ask Joe if he'll implement the hf2.

GC should have it at some point too, but things are slow.

Yeh, GM is the muts nuts.

 monks

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## monks

Humble beginnings...this is the first order of ridge networks going in.




monks

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## Redrobes

Cool  :Smile: 

I found that bug and fixed it. Its running another pass but it probably wont finish tonight.

Since your around tho... is the amount of snow about right in the last pic ? I can up the temperature a bit and force it northwards.

The land is very close to sea level in the bottom too so that there is this huge beach. That must be about 5m or so above sea level and very flat indeed. There are 20 mile waves crashing in there at mo  :Surprised: 

Oh yeah one thing. Are the rivers and lakes in the ice fields liquid or frozen over ?

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## Redrobes

Ok so I couldn't wait for tomorrow...

Monks - check this out. This I think is the very first version of MeDem V1.0 coloured up. So it has a few rough edges at this point but these seem like areas which can be fixed easily as opposed to making another ascent through a precipitous frosty crevasse to do it.

 :Smile: 

Critique it strongly and ill get it all fixed up. For a start there are hardly any trees at this point etc.

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## monks

woah. hahah! effing good sh*t! LOVE IT.

 Can we get more natural fall off on the ice by latitude? That's a harsh transition; just a little. I was thinking a fall off influenced by river valleys but that's just one idea- whether tis doable I dunno. The temperature would be moderated by water and the relief being more sheltered- ie the rivers. Also I think large areas of veg as well- but there aren't any are there?  :Smile: 

 Don't know what happened with the bottom edge. Some export problem from GM obviously. It's a minor detail we can cut that off...well needs must on this occasion I think. I don't want to go back now: let's just do this run. Going forward.

Yes, just looked again. The ice should not come that far south. It should have its *absolute* limit along the northern edge of those mountains- the ones runs east-west. Even that would be too much. I think some degrees north of that line.

 A bit too much snow on the Mistys as well. Can we reduce that cover?

 I see what you mean about the bottom left yes? That is one huge beach...! I could add a little in WM to that area- just some polys to undulate. There's the hills of course but not sure how many are down there.

this needs changing- this should be grasslands- what is that? moorland?





This is AWESOME- gotta get me a bigger pic of this Robes. Can you stick one up on the ftp? The whole transition from river -> hills -> moorland is so beautiful. All that complexity. Once we add the hills in in World Machine.... sweeeeeeeeet.

monks

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## Redrobes

Fun isn't it. Knackered today - cue bleary eyes etc...

The map is 10x10 tiles and it takes about 5 mins per tile so thats about 5hrs for the map. So checking a change is not too bad but then applying that change globally is a bit harder. Still, by using the makefile you can select which tiles you want to ditch and recalc and it will run through just updating them only thats really really cool when your looking at this much time to recalc.

I think generally there is too much snow and that the temperature needs to be increased. To fade out that snowline I thought that we should increase the solar heating so that you get bare south sides of the mountains which would stagger that snow line much more. I think the Mistys should be dappled with snow not solid right ?

Lets forget the bottom left and concentrate on the Mistys + Mindol areas then and get the bits that matter about right. I am hoping that there will be some mountainous texture on the Mordor border and stuff like that cos its a bit flat right now. Maybe we will submit just Mistys as a map ? Still, all that I think is the problem is that the land towards the sea does not have much definition and its very low. I have the beach settings in the tex compositor so I could hack them down a bit. But the land around that area is just above sea level and very flat so its putting in a big beach. The waves are just 0.25m high and they span quite a distance so it must be really flat indeed. Not to worry tho.

That dark patch is igneous rock instead of normal. I will have to check my settings here as I think that veg should cover most of that up. I will have to blur the igneous mask a lot too I think. Its too sharp.

My main issue is that the whole thing is grass so I have to up the trees and get them in. There should be some forests in there but it didn't grow them for some reason. Maybe its too cold at mo. Will push up the veg param anyway with the temperature then maybe they will come in.

I'll upload a big pic somewhere though I should get you a VDale version as its fun to whiz round it. I ought to get the height map down to about 2K to so I can play with DragonFlight too.

----------


## monks

re snow on mistys Yes, if you look at Google Earth Alps from high up, the snow actually adds definition to the ridge patterns. When I was working in WM I got the snow coverage on the tex just right so that it brings out those macro structures- it looks just like the google shots. That's the same latitude so.

Depends on just how much I manage to do here in WM. So that's a yes on entering a separate Mistys- I think the whole map will be not far off that Misty quad.

re: bottom left

yes, I'll tool with that as the last thing on my list, but it's not priority.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Ok, warmed it up a bit so that snow goes to the Northernm ridge line. Added a bit more veg and fixed up the igneous to be under the veg this time (duh!) and improved the river water texture to be more consistent. Lorien, Fangorn and Mirkwood still not coming through so ill look into that next.

Making a few more changes and starting a new full run.

----------


## Redrobes

New one. Some of the forests have come out this time. Still there are some holes in them. I think this might be due to flooding but I am not sure at this stage. Will have to look and fix that since I zap all the water off the map before rendering it.

Lorien is not coming out still. This could be that its higher in altitude or that its too cold from that too. I will have to check the temperature map to see. I am wondering if I should raise the temperature where there is forests since there are some in the ice fields and they will never come out if its this cold. I am not sure how cold it is up there but on our map its very cold indeed - like about -20 or something like that.

Anyway - I am pleased at how its coming along. Still lots to fix up but anything else that is glaringly obviously wrong to an M.E. eye that I don't have.

Oh yeah, I added a little smoothing to one stage which added about a minute to a tile calc. Thats an extra 2 hours to calc now. Will have to do something about that I think. So its at about 7 or so hrs at mo.

----------


## monks

Looking good.


"I am wondering if I should raise the temperature where there is forests since there are some in the ice fields and they will never come out if its this cold. I am not sure how cold it is up there but on our map its very cold indeed - like about -20 or something like that."

 Absolutely. That whole area is looking like an ice cap. It should be tundra and boreal forests and higher in latitudes- krumholtz. True full ice cap should be at the most northern extremity on that coast north of the most northern range of mountains. to south are those forests as you mentioned. If we have to 'hack' the to get the forests out, so be it.
 I was going to say that we need to keep this bay with more ice- pretty much as it was previously in fact- this is called the Ice Bay of Forochel. It fgures in the Histories.



This area (Angmar) should be preternaturally cold because of the presence of the Witch King. I think just shade less ice tho.



..as for the big map....WOWzer! Omg, can't wait to get those hills,and mountains in...

Finished the first pass on the mountains about now....yeh I know, 3 passes is pushing it especially considering that the next networks require more manual labour. I think we'll probably have to settle for 2 passes.
 just noticed the misty as well- yep that's pretty much the effect of th snow cover I meant.

monks

----------


## ravells

Redrobes this is looking stunning! What a huge amount of work, but the results are amazing.

----------


## Redrobes

> Redrobes this is looking stunning! What a huge amount of work, but the results are amazing.


Its a mind boggling amount of work. Monks has been at the map for ages and ages putting in all sorts of detail then there are other besides us and Seer who have contributed too. GTS was modified from a shell of a program into this huge complex beast just for this one single purpose and there's been lots of ancillary little apps that go in too like the tex compositor, cutter, blender, flow mask and file format conversions. Even the makefiles which drive the whole are huge then the main height map file format HF2 was done by Aaron of L3DT but it was the interchange between all the apps like L3DT and GM and WM and GTS etc that drove that process too so its just huge.

Anna said that for her the one thing that she needed more than anything else to make the Greyhawk maps was a kind of perseverance and tenacity. And we all agreed on that. There have been so many times where we have been facing sheer cliffs of impossibly hard climb that we have dropped the project for weeks just to recover to take the pain again and pick it back up. But now we are actually getting colored images out its starting to seem like fun and worth it all.

This is a 10K square map and the plan is to do 160K square using GTS but that requires that it gives the right results as it bumps up the res. When faced with that its just off putting to the extent that I thought if we don't get something tangible out then we would never get a grip on this. When the map for print challenge came up I thought well I don't need more clutter but it wouldn't half be a good idea to get a poster made of some of ME to put on the wall. Whether this could be an entry is debatable given the previous work and collective effort but the idea is that we *ought* to be able to have a print in any case so this is as good a time as any to get the 90% into 100% and chug this out as a starter print.

----------


## Steel General

I know is an immense effort and you have a quite a ways to go. But I wonder if it would be worth it to talk to Anna (if you haven't already) about a Greyhawk map done this way, once Middle Earth is done.

----------


## monks

*once Middle Earth is done*....Sacre Bleu!!!!!..as if? hahaha

 There are so many cool worlds to do- concurrently even...that's an old dream of mine. Greyhawk would be up there  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Well at least we have the know how and tools to do it. I think Anna might be a tad upset if we did tho.

Monks - would you say our map is 2275 miles across ? Is that a pretty accurate figure ? I have taken it from other maps scale and tried to align it to ours. I am cooking up something incredibly cool again but you will have to wait but I know your going to like it heh heh...

----------


## monks

It's 4000 km across to the T. whatever that is in miles to the gallon...

ooh! haha

Mountains half done I'd say...



monks

----------


## Redrobes

Thanks and nice pic - coming along nicely. I scaled up ME to that exact size and found a bug in VDale which now having looked and fixed it is really obscure - like had to have a child icon at a -ve position rounded to exact multiple of 100 miles and it loads it up wrong. Fixed now but that was a surprise. Anyway, continuing with my mystery cool thing...  :Wink:

----------


## SeerBlue

Looking reaallly great Monks,

 RR, how dare you, I hate mysteries, I cast a pox of stale ale reeking bogs upon thee!,,,,not really, though I will spend untold hours trying to guess what you are up to and still be wrong.

 The FHCO have been busy with xfrog making trees and plants, I just have to find time to convert the pics and upload them to snapgallows, truly otherworldy things they make.
 SeerBlue

----------


## monks

The hills mask has gone in. 
 I'm going to add gentle undulating noise to everywhere bar the mountains. then a smaller scale noise likewise. this saves you doing it Robes. WM has the advanced perlin which really excels as this multifractal stuff. I'd still rather do that stuff by hand but time presses on.

 At the moment the terrain has a little preview erosion going on in WM in realtime, but I'll take this off before exporting.

 I think I'll put the stone fields in as well- use a mutilfractal breakup.



monks

----------


## monks

Just realised, I think I'll have to subtract the rivers mask from the hills mask. I used a blur on the hills mask within WM which may cause problems for rivers.- don't know yet.  REMIND ME!

monks

----------


## Redrobes

You might have to be careful with the subtraction. Wont you get a big dip in the flat lands too ?

I am just smoothing out the last problems with my new stages to the makefile... ok so its not all that exciting but its another thing that needed to be done.

----------


## monks

No, I mean multiplying the binary masks. It won't affect height, just xy.

monks

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## Redrobes

Ahh right yes I see now.

I have been doing place names. Instead of using VDale to put them in I thought that it would be much better to have a solution which is more independent and allows greater flexibility since VDale has one font which has pros and cons but I think for a fixed printed map the cons outweigh the pros in this case.

So what I have put together is a text based list of place names and index them in by position in miles - hence the request. Also, you can specify the type of name and size. So right now all I have is 10 size levels. The font is rendered with a halo of the background color to it which fades out.

So the end product is another 10K image - thats 3 now for color, lighting and placenames. Putting all 3 into VDale is slowing it up a little now cos thats 300 x 1024 x 1024 images its pushing around which is quite a lot. Still, it prints out just fine.

So here are some images. All we need to do now is add all the names and the coords for them. Not an insignificant task I admit but then nothing is with this project eh ?

I have integrated this into the make system so that if the places text file changes then it reimages all the names and makes all the tiles for them again. That, like the rest of the make system, is just wonderful. God I love GNUMake.

----------


## monks

Cool! I like the font as well. There is an ICE font if you look on the net in the right places. Fan modules group had one I know that, but this is very nice too.
 Was in the studio yesterday. Back in Middle Earth now haha. Onwards...carpe diem.

monks

----------


## monks

You can see the effect of the new multiply shaving the blur off the hill extents. Note that the river bed does not slip below the original height. Good job I thought of that!



monks

----------


## Redrobes

Thats good stuff. It will be interesting to see the new mountains.

----------


## monks

hmm the new mountains ain't THAT great if you compere them to the Misty range. But that full on job is for another day. I want to run the dem output from WM overnight tonight...so anything I want/ need to do has to be done today. OK Robes?

First hack at general noise- need to make some adjustments- its riding up on the hills.





monks

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## monks

*SEER, I WANT YOU TO GET BACK IN TOUCH WITH THE GUY (ROB WAS IT?) AT NASA WHO WAS ASKING ON ME-DEM ABOUT HOSTING THIS TERRAIN.*

 We've got product now so......!

monks

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## Redrobes

Ohh ringing in the ears now  :Razz: 

Hey I can host some of it. I mean a 10K map is no problem and bigger is ok but when we get to 160K well then that's where its gets difficult  :Very Happy:  I am still hosting a few hundred megs of terrain tiles so I can replace that at any time.

----------


## SeerBlue

That was Bull_(UK) at the world wind forums, one of the core  members there, if I remember right, I will have to pop over to the world wind tiles-xml thread at me-dem to check,,,,about 15 months back,,,,,wow it has been awhile.
 SeerBlue

----------


## SeerBlue

making a Google Map of this will be easy, the laptop can handle 10k, so I can do that anytime, so a google map is a go'er

 and making the image and bil tiles for world wind should be easy as well, but, because this laptop won't run World Wind, testing the xml file is a no go for me,,,had a thought,I must have uploaded the Anduin Vale xml to me-dem, so I should be able to take that, modify the extents for the higher resolution tile set, and it should work,,,,then I have to figure out how to point the accessor at a server to dish them out if we are going to put them on line,,,but I wont be able to check if it works until I get my new computer in Feb,,,unless I scale back my "want this comp" ,and buy something for the interim just to run it....may do that just because I have the cash on hand for a dual core,,,,and then give it to the kids when I step up to a quad,,,,4 kids with two computers and 2 laptops would work better than 1 comp and 2 laptops anyway.. 


runs off to check bank account and read through his own tutorial for using his own excel workbook for world wind tiles ,cause he don't 'disrememba" so well..

 Should have a dual core on Thursday, plenty of ram and 'nuff space on the hard drives to make a few mistakes,

 For WW, Once I am ready I'll need a hf2/hfz of the heightfield, the shaded/TEXTURED terrain image, and probably transparent pngs of the place names at different font sizes ( cause zooming in on the terrain is cool, but zooming in on a humongous letter G has the odd effect of concealing terrain) 

SeerBlue

----------


## monks

hahaha! Did I shout that loud enough? 

 Cool. I do hope he's still interested.
 Just had an absolutely amazing terrain open in WM. I need to do a little something to it before I can post any screenies. This is the last of it now this end.  Need to lie down...so tired...*says body*...ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER!!!! *screams brain*...


///see you've posted again Seer- read later...

monks

----------


## monks

ok still got said thing to do but at this distance you can't see the problem.

 Check this out. This is with the undulating noise I mentioned (first take). It avoids the hills, mts and rivers, sea.  This is REALLY exciting...and this is only the beginning...! Look at the hydrography! these can only get batter. I want to see REAL functioning watersheds baby! And I wan to see those mountains how they should be...one thing at a time phew!
 The old ICE topo is becoming a liability now for these eye candies.



and remember this is without any real erosion.
...the topo stuff


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...eginning03.png

monks

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## monks

yeh i know I'm a big pic freak sorry, but this is good sh*it.. :Smile: 



monks

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## Redrobes

Cool and groovy. If those rivers were taken from the 10K version then this erosion looks like its at a lot higher than 10K square grid. It must be a procedural type done on the fly which would be quite impressive. Are you able to get me another .ter in exactly the same way as last time ?

I will try to get more names in there tonight.

----------


## monks

The rt erosion is on the mts. It is pretty impressive stuff, but the rivers are a result of the perlins raising the terrain around the clamped river beds. Well I'm on my way to rendering this out. Gotta shoot for tonight. Hope to have a 10K terrain fro you tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed cos 4 GB may not cut this. Not sure. May have to give you 4 5K ters. Is that ok? 

monks

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## monks

All sounds great Seer! especially the letter G zoom. That's personally why I'm in this game...for the giant letters... heh.
 World Wind- some on, we can't turn down an offer like we had back there can we now....? Just hope it's still on.
 Yep, we can dish it from several sources anyway Robes. 

monks

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## monks

ok I have 5 things to do. The problem that I mentioned is now sorted. 
 3 of these are small modelling tasks: the southern beaches being one. the others are punching in numbers.



monks

----------


## Redrobes

Good going Monks, I reckon were in with a shout of getting it done in time. And yes 4x5K's is fine. Just keep all the settings about the same or tell me what the height offset is. I'll try to get as many of the text labels in as I can.

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## monks

Had a set back tonight; cost me a few hours but it's sorted now.
 Im goin run this anyway before I hit the sack. Any more last minute modelling could be done on top of that dem first thing tomorrow morning. 

monks

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## Redrobes

S'funny cos I had a setback which I fixed eventually. All the text was coming out a few mm away from where it should and this was a problem. I forgot an offset so its alright now.

So latest... you wont be able to read the really small print like Cair Andros for example but you can in the high res version. I'll get one of those to you shortly like after a new height map and updates etc. I think I have the ability to do italics and other fonts but I dont think it needs it right now. I could do with the umlauts and accents and other stuff but will look into that later tho.

I expect that the names are for the wrong age and other ME issues but you know me - total ME luddite  :Razz: 

So to the map...  :Smile:

----------


## Midgardsormr

That brings up a question: What period will this map represent? Obviously, the terrain is suited for anything following the ruin of Beleriand, but when it comes to labels, what are you shooting for?

----------


## monks

Hi Midgardsormr, Third Age 1640 which is when the map sources were set. But right now we're not going to get that detailed. The map is more generic at this point.

So far, 6 hours rendering n WM. This may be a 24 hour job. It's rendering as a single terrain. Oh ye, there is hfz in the output options...ha. So it's coming over to you as that. Stephen must have put that in without telling anyone. He's not been active in the WM forums since October 20th. Wow, work hard, play hard.

 Oh yes, I left the erosion in by accident, d'oh! It's not a major erosion. What do you reckon Robes? If I take it out it'll certainly speed up the render by a LOT. It'll also increase the potential size of the render but that doesn't seem to be a problem right now- we're about 80% into it.

monks

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## monks

ok scuppered that run. I was running erosion on everything. Bad idea. Not necessary.

 I'm going again. I'm going to leave erosion on mountains only. Hills, etc will be unprocessed.

monks

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## Redrobes

Midgard raises a valid point. Is there a ref map link that I should look at for the correct names for the map.

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## monks

There's the topo of course. You should have at lest one of those knocking around.
 This render is a beast. I think this is going to be tomorrow morning guys- running all night.This has really surprised me. Sorry for the delay. I've got 2 erosion devices in there on the mountains only. Jeez...
 If it goes caput I'll just take out all erosion and simply run that- that'll be about 4 hours max. So either way mid tomorrow.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Been looking at veg today and figuring out why GTS has not been giving as good a veg maps as it ought to. I think I have found the answer but running it through to see now.

Came across this today too. Anyone for cake ?

----------


## monks

ahahaha! The Minas Tirith cake!! nutta! "I ate Minas Tirith"


 Ok pulled the plug on that last run. No erosion. running now. Should be done by tonight.
 I reckon that the full erosion render may well take a week or more...*gulp*...

monks



///Steve any chance of you modifying DF to render out cakes? ...maybe a cake shader in there or something?

----------


## Redrobes

Heh a cake shader eh ??? Hmmm not a lot of call for that one but you never know...

I have a render out. I made it do the full bung in the middle of the Mistys and then do some cheap bypass off that area so no snow in the north etc - just enough to tell me whether this is worth it or not. I think it is looking at it as we have Fangorn and Lorien full now and no duff region in Mirkwood. The new code makes getting the Veg right much easier than before. Veg growth before was a criminally sporadic process. There is some scope that this new veg change might help with rivers too... in that bizarre kind of way GTS works.

Anyway - is this better ?

----------


## monks

yeh! looking great! This is a lot better in all areas.  Top left is maybe not quite as richly varied- can't guage that too well from what I can see here. Great job Robes!

 OK dem called RENDER is going up into the dems folder of the CartoGuildComp (phase2 dir).
 It's a hfz and opens fine in L3DT and GM yipeeeee!!!! We have a nice suite of apps now to work with  :Smile:   :Smile: 

 nipping out... oh yeh  btw there's a bit of a horrid line around the Misty quad (that didn't show up in WM probably because it is works differently with rendering things)- I think a bit of blurring/brushwork is in order. Hopefully the erosion will help too.

 Rauros hills are not done- needs work- flat. Also the beach in the south is still very flat. These jobs can be done tomorrow as last minute things depending on when you start your run.

some screenies to follow later...

monks

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## Redrobes

Created an HF2 offsetter which allows me to resample the height map you provided and reposition it into a another one so it can be rescaled to 10000 and then set into a 10240 square. That's done and running now but I need to see the results to know whether it is working or not. Its no problem for you to keep going. Its basically about 4 hrs to run from new DEM to result so we can go to the wire with changes.

----------


## monks

*Great! Today is to get some fixes in there.*






monks

----------


## Redrobes

Nice work again Monks, I have a render now....

a*se !

No Veg - gnashing of teeth... So expect another at some point with some veg on it... ho hum.

----------


## SeerBlue

looking g reat guys, 98 meg hfz, wow, I will start downloading before I go to sleep, 12 32 pm, and look at it in GM once I wake,,,,,whoot! 1 day off this week, and it is a thursday,,,, 
SeerBlue

----------


## monks

Robes, is the southern coastline ok now in the latest runs? Looks like the perlins I put in over all the map may help...? 

monks

----------


## monks

Filled in some glaring gaps that i never knew were there in the hills mask. It happened because there is some duplication between the hills masks and mts mask. Some got lost in the mix.

 The next update will be a fairly significant improvement.
 i'll try process it for first thing tomorrow morning.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Nicely done and the new render is out. Even I am starting to think it looks real cool now and I am my own worst critic. I still dont like the areas that have no veg. If they really dont have veg then it should only be sand color when the temperature is high so I don't know why its doing that. It should be dry mud if not wet mut but not sand. Will look at the texture script again. Actually just writing that I know why its doing it.... Hmmm right ok I can fix that no problem.

So here is another WIP. Critic it strongly, names, veg, too much ice and stuff like that. I am concentrating on the middle horizontal band from bottom of ice to top of desert. I think middle Mordor needs to have volcanic mask too - its set like it so its another texturing issue there.

----------


## Redrobes

Just sussed that texturing issues. Little mini map here to show the result.

----------


## SeerBlue

ok, since you asked, it looks like the Province of Gondor named Lebennin is spelt Labennin.

Just north of Belfalas Bay "Angmar" appears on the map, should be Anfalas, as in Anfalas, Belfalas, and Tolfalas, which run west to east along the coast.
 Angmar is in the north of the Misty Mts,,,the big claw.

Enedhwaith, the open heath between southern Eriador and the Isen, is spelt Enedwaith on the map, needs an "h" after the "d"..

Monks, what projection and extents are you using in GM for the "Render" hfz, since the hfz file does not include that info when I open it I get a 10005 x 10005 heightfield covering less than a 2 x 2 arc degree area ,,,,,some where around 20 meter per pixel res, so pretty small coverage 200000 meters by 200000 meters total...the meta data in the control center ought to have the data, 


 I'll keep looking, and comparing to both the ice map and my copy of " The Complete Tolkien Companion"

SeerBlue

----------


## Redrobes

Thanks for the labeling tips - ill sort that out right away.

Since the shire is supposed to be about where I live and I am at 52 deg north and ME is based on our world then it seems to be that radius is 6371km so thats 3922km at 52 deg so circumference would be 24645 and the map is 4000km across so that's 58.43 degrees of map in the middle. I don't know our map projection tho.

----------


## monks

Here's the metadata for the Vector frame quadrant we are using. All the exports get clipped to this.

FILENAME=E:\ME-DEM\VERSION_1.0\VectorFrame.shp
DESCRIPTION=VectorFrame.shp
AREA COUNT=1
LINE COUNT=0
POINT COUNT=0
UPPER LEFT X=-411.375
UPPER LEFT Y=2000348.034
LOWER RIGHT X=2000311.377
LOWER RIGHT Y=-348.038
WEST LONGITUDE=1° 43' 24.7340" W
NORTH LATITUDE=18° 05' 26.4494" N
EAST LONGITUDE=17° 01' 23.2164" E
SOUTH LATITUDE=0° 00' 11.3350" S
PROJ_DESC=UTM Zone 31 / NAD83 / meters
PROJ_DATUM=NAD83
PROJ_UNITS=meters
COVERED AREA=1545499 sq mi



I'm working on some significant improvement today. I'd really like to get these in guys of poss,...

 Oshyan is reinstating the galleries- he did say the has the dev images archived. We may have a Joomla upgrade.

monks

----------


## Steel General

> Since the shire is supposed to be about where I live and I am at 52 deg north and ME is based on our world then it seems to be that radius is 6371km so thats 3922km at 52 deg so circumference would be 24645 and the map is 4000km across so that's 58.43 degrees of map in the middle. I don't know our map projection tho.


This reminded me of a map I stumbled across the otehr day when looking for some inspiration. I'm sure you've probably seen it before but here's the *link*.

----------


## monks

running the render now guys for the update. No more modeling work on this now...

monks

----------


## monks

Yeh Steel General I've seen that one before. It's kind interesting, especially as we have ideas to use real world dems (terrain models) on a future version . The problem with going to far with this direct comparison is that if you try and force Middle Earth timeline into the real earth timeline you find yourself back in an ice age. That's great news if you'e simply looking at the coastline- it fits better because the sea level is lower. But one major oversight is the fact all that water has to go somewhere. It ends up as a mile high ice sheet covering the UK down to somewhere like Oxford. As that is where Hobbiton The Shire is, that's not good news!

monks

----------


## Steel General

Nope, not good at all...wouldn't want Bag-End as a big ice cube.  :Very Happy:

----------


## monks

...but maybe that's why all hobbits have hairy feet? ha!

 This is a monster render. It's not going to be ready until tomorrow morning. We're talking a 17+ hour render. *If* we can use this tomorrow it'll be worth it.

 Oh yeh, finally got my full working WM 2.0 from Stephen today. YAY!

monks

----------


## monks

Done! It's not perfect- there is one glaring oversight- but it's another significant improvement! 

This dem is already respanned to the correct vertical range. (there's an unspanned one in there as well as Render_02)


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._02_respan.hfz

I'm going to work towards improving this again...
*blur that border around the Misty quad. 
*fix the oversight I mentioned.
*couple of other little modelling jobs
*get the stone fields in.

I'll probably tinker a lot with this as well...ooooh mi little tinkers

_...onwards!..._

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Cool. Started running the new one today - got about an hour in and thought, hang on I didnt take out the respan fix. So had to restart. Going again and looks good so far. Gimme another 5 hrs or so.

Whats this stony region here. I am guessing that its a raised bit of land with sufficient height to be textured as rock.

----------


## waldronate

Should be The Brown Lands. The gardens of the Entwives destroyed during one of the inter-war periods by the bad folks. Now a wasteland but should be more brownish than grayish. See http://www.tuckborough.net/plains.html for a description and references.

----------


## Redrobes

Thanks Waldronate, I think that ought to be fairly easy to fix up. My worry is that theres a thousand little errors like that all over the map from my texturing. I'll have to go through the map with Monks and get the lowdown on what all the places are. I am the doppleganger of Middle Earth fandom.

----------


## Redrobes

> It's 4000 km across to the T. whatever that is in miles to the gallon...





> ...and the map is 4000km across so that's 58.43 degrees of map in the middle.





> Here's the metadata for the Vector frame quadrant we are using...
> 
> UPPER LEFT X=-411.375
> UPPER LEFT Y=2000348.034
> LOWER RIGHT X=2000311.377
> LOWER RIGHT Y=-348.038
> WEST LONGITUDE=1° 43' 24.7340" W
> NORTH LATITUDE=18° 05' 26.4494" N
> EAST LONGITUDE=17° 01' 23.2164" E
> ...


Hmm there seems to be a mismatch between figures here. The meta data is claiming 2000.750km or so instead of 4000 so the 18 degrees would be much more if 4000Km. Confused now. Other maps have it much more like 4000km than 2000.

----------


## Redrobes

Just messin about with DF... Although ME is not the most stimulating map in 3D due to its continental size its much easier to see stuff like these brown lands being raised now.

----------


## monks

wow what a coincidence, that's twice that word was used today: doppleganger: once by a hip hop rapsta, the other by a s**t hot mapsta.

 Yeh you're right Joe of course, well that kind of tweaking is for ME-DEM rather than the compo entry. We can only do so much on a v.1.0 but by the stars we have a v1.0!!! How does that feel...? _SMOKIN!!!!_

*GREAT JOB EVERYONE!*






monks

----------


## monks

Robes about the extents. We've been working with half scale in Global Mapper due to Seer not being able to output the dem + topos at full res on his old comp. Seer has handled most of the GM stuff. We went to half res a while back. It doesn't affect the ME-DEM core data in any way since the contours that generate the dem are all vectors. We have plenty of full res topos lying around as well should we need to re-rectify to a full res GM workspace.

monks

----------


## SeerBlue

yaa, my borrowed laptop was a bit underpowered, I always thought it had 1 gig of memory as it could open a 10k topo and a 10k dem, but not a 20k anything,,,,had a look under the hood the other day, it only had 512k memory (reported 456 though) , and 7 year old memory at that,,,,GM must have some good memory handling tucked in the code..
 My new, interim (before I give it to the kids) laptop is 3 gig, runs nice and smooth, its so quiet when running I begin to think it has died, the old one sounded like a Vulcan Bomber on take off when rendering with terragen.
 I have World Wind set up, just have to get my MS expression disks from Carol and I can whip up a Gmap, test the xml, and cut tiles,,, and catch up on the CWBP maps for Inspired Cartography...

SeerBlue

----------


## monks

I think it's about time we had some new graphics on the ME-DEM page. We can take the new stuff from this terrain 1.0 run. As soon as Oshyan gets the 1.5 install up we can launch the terrain 1.0.
 Ha! Yep GM must have some swanky mem handling- that's an understatement.

This is really basic texturing in WM...STILL cannot get those glaciers right...doing my head in...nice effect from a distance tho! I should say that this has been posted in PS. 




monks

----------


## monks

omg, Im really moved. I'm so proud of this project and so grateful to have hooked up with such a great bunch of guys.

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog



The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

I just got that last WIP in for the compo but whether it wins is not important to me. Just to be able to say there it is we have something tangible to show is really something. Feels like a big weight lifted off. Like sitting down on an enormous plateau after climbing a steep cliff for a long time. Still plenty to do of course but for now I am just going to absorb the rays and stop for a while...

I'll have to get you the build files and some of the mods for them I did tonight. Really pleased with how the tools have handled it actually. Its been steaming away with all cores going full tilt for days and its not even so much as flinched at all. Not going to say its bug free cos every time I do something new with it another pops out but the core stuff must be pretty clean now. Sorta feel like a 40K is not beyond it or my machines capabilities any more. Its good that the veg got fixed up too cos to have one script that must grow veg over ice caps to deserts and all in between is pretty good - I had my doubts that it was going to do that. I still have my doubts whether it can do that for the water / rivers too but we haven't half been thrown some barriers to hurdle and so far nothing has been a show stopper so gotta think positive about it.

So do you think that Osh might want to throw TG2 at it now  :Wink:

----------


## monks

Yeh, simple as that really. I do actually feel like a sense of satisfaction- didn't expect to even ha!

..

Yep, 40K...oooh. Makefile is pretty damn cool eh? 
 We're still not entirely sure about rivers, but it's the journey, not a destination if you know what I mean. Well, we should run and see at some point soon. I'd like to see a render of a subset at high res- that'd be interesting- maybe a 20K Misty quad. Lots of ideas anyway.

...
Oh well....not sure about that. I just don't think he personally has the time. I'll give it a go though and I think Seer would be up for it. I'll ask Osh anyway once I get the next update out.
 I'd like to see a link between GTS and TG, but you've got to know that you're actually going to get some renders for all that coding work. Like I say I'l take it up with Osh.

monks

----------


## ckirmser

I see this thread is quite old and I hate to bring it back, zombie-like, from the dead, but I have been searching for info on the Middle Earth DEM and find that it is pretty much scoured from the 'Net.

Back in August of '07, I was lucky enough to have downloaded the ME-DEM DevImages zip file and have been trying to use what that folder contains to create maps for a Neverwinter Nights 2 module I'm stupidly making the attempt to create.

But, I have discovered that the ogres with Tolkien Enterprises is on the warpath against all the map data.

And, of course, no one is still working on this project privately, are they? *wink wink nudge nudge*

----------


## Ascension

I haven't seen monks around for quite some time but Red will be along tomorrow to answer for ya.

----------


## 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  :Wink: 

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  :Smile:  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.  :Wink: 

monks

----------


## ckirmser

> 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


I hate to be so terribly dense, but where do I go to register on ME-DEM?

World Machine is frikkin' amazing, but I have a lot to learn about it before I can put it to good use...

----------


## Redrobes

> where do I go to register on ME-DEM?


The web site is over here. Mail if there are any login problems.

http://www.me-dem.org/index.php?opti...nena&Itemid=43

----------


## ckirmser

> The web site is over here. Mail if there are any login problems.
> 
> http://www.me-dem.org/index.php?opti...nena&Itemid=43


Oh, well, heck...

I didn't even try that, since I thought Tolkien Enterprises killed it.

D'oy!

_...sheepishly I ventured forth to register..._

----------


## ckirmser

> 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


Well, I've registered at ME-DEM and I'd love to take a gander at your data. If I can get it figured out, I can use it to make modules for NWN2 and create ICE's MERP game for it.

'Course, that'd be a ways down the road...

----------


## Redrobes

Its not my data I just color it up a bit with some procedural oompa loompa scripty stuff. Monks does the 3D bit. And now that you have ventured over there you can see how amazingly active its been. No need for Tolkien Ents to come in were doing just fine fossilizing all by ourselves  :Wink: 

For your project maybe you should try Global Mapper and ask Monks for some tips. I don't have it and have no idea how to drive it.

----------


## ckirmser

> And now that you have ventured over there you can see how amazingly active its been. No need for Tolkien Ents to come in were doing just fine fossilizing all by ourselves


Ha! "Tolkien Ents," that's rich...




> For your project maybe you should try Global Mapper and ask Monks for some tips. I don't have it and have no idea how to drive it.


Well, I'm not really intending to map the entirety of Middle Earth. Basically, I look at the maps used for the particular MERP module and see if I can grab just that small section from a larger DEM file. Then, I'll try to provide fine detail to the much smaller map, making it suitable for import to NWN2 where I'll add the man-made stuff.

Probably too ambitious a project - but, hey, why not?

----------


## monks

ckirmser, if you tell me what you want to do over at ME-DEM I'll be able to say if I can help. 

 My two main apps are Global Mapper and World Machine. GeoTerSys is also a big part of it, but tends to lie at the end of the pipeline, and so depends a lot on me finishing up stuff.

monks

----------


## ckirmser

> ckirmser, if you tell me what you want to do over at ME-DEM I'll be able to say if I can help. 
> 
>  My two main apps are Global Mapper and World Machine. GeoTerSys is also a big part of it, but tends to lie at the end of the pipeline, and so depends a lot on me finishing up stuff.
> 
> monks


Well, okey dokey - heading there now...

----------


## monks

It's been some time...
The project has officially moved forward and we are now in new territory! That update took about a year....bit laggy this internet ain't it?!  :Smile: 

 The northern flank of the Erd Nimrais is finished. I'm going to do some work over the next few days on the Misty Mts river exits, and then it's back into Global Mapper with this!

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View05.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View06.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View07.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View08.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View10.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...er%20View9.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...%20View_04.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...%20View_05.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...%20View_06.png

monks

----------


## Steel General

Thanks for the updates, good to see the project is still 'alive & kicking'  :Smile:

----------


## Ascension

Looks fantastic.

----------


## monks

Cheers guys  :Wink: 

I don't know if I've posted these before or not. I use Global Mapper. The contour map was created by hand using data from all my role playing book sources; out of maybe 70 or so books, about 6 or 7 proved helpful.
 The map was drawn in Photoshop at 10K pixels square with a 1 px wide pencil. Your computer screen is about 1K square and this full stop is 1px. Can you imagine what that was like?...hahaha..it was quite insane. I literally lived and breathed that map for maybe 3 or 4 months.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...o/Contours.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...ndContours.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...obalMapper.jpg

some more with underlying terrain. This is pre- processed terrain. Not the final product.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._5527697_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...3_820657_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._8177943_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...5_890524_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._3964528_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._1939624_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._1151377_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._3531647_n.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._1785018_n.jpg


Oh yes I've got a texture folks can have. It's a seamless 4096 aerial view of woodland. It may well be tileable as well. I made it in imagesynth using shots from GoogleEarth of the Black Forest. Each is 40 megs.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../output_03.tif

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...ut_03_blue.tif

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...t_03_green.tif

Cheers,
monks

----------


## Ascension

I can't even begin to imagine the insanity.  Ravs, you gotta get this guy a straight jacket - he's foaming at the mouth, scratching the paint off the walls, and eating dirt.   :Smile:   You are, without doubt. the most dedicated mapper here, man.  Cheers and keep up the epicness.

----------


## monks

hahaha!...nice one Ascension. :Smile:   I've seem some pretty cool maps round here- the one on the front page is excellent! I especially like the little detail with the trees and bushes. Awesome that! I'm always learning. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a better way of using real world terrain data. I think I'm missing a trick there. 

 Hey if any of you guys ever want seamless, tileable, textures of vegetation etc from Google I can knock them up with a little program called imagesynth. If I post links where would be the best place to do it?


monks

----------


## Steel General

> Hey if any of you guys ever want seamless, tileable, textures of vegetation etc from Google I can knock them up with a little program called imagesynth. If I post links where would be the best place to do it?
> 
> monks


I would say the Mapping Elements forum would be the best place.

----------


## monks

ok, ta General  :Wink:

----------


## Midgardsormr

Mapping Elements for the textures, and Software Discussion for the utility.

----------


## monks

Hi Midgardsormr, the utility was not written by me, but I can post info about it over there I guess. Did you once have an account on Deviant Art by any chance?

monks

----------


## monks

A glimpse of the map as purely vectors. I've removed the topographic map and the terrain to have a wee look at it.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../bigscreen.jpg

The contours were generated from the very basic terrain- at 400m per pixel. The central quad is at the next level of detail, though I've removed most of the contours because they were so dense. I'm currently working on the quad immediately to the south of that. You can see it here.
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...r%20View06.png


 Those two quads can then be eroded and more detailed contours generated. That would be the third level of detail. After all of the map terrain has been worked on. It can then be increased in resolution. This map is at about 10K. We have the data at 20K as well. The next step will probably be to take it all to 40K. It could be taken to 100K and higher, and more terrain detail added procedurally but it all depends what we want to do with the terrain and the map data.

monks

----------


## ravells

I have never seen such dedication to a single mapping project. Monks, this is just incredible. To have drawn all the contours by hand is simply mind boggling. Ascension's right, I think you need an asylum of your very own!!!

----------


## monks

Thanks very much Ravells...I think lol  :Razz: 
 We always figured from the outset that all of the most informative maps have terrain, from which you generate contours of course. You usually don't include the terrain in the topo- unless you have shaded relief (which I do like on a map), but it has to be done subtley or otherwise it makes it difficult to see what's going on. I prefer the physical sort of maps anyway, as opposed to the political ones.
 Something I'm wondering is, I haven't seen any maps with contours on here. I've seen lots of terrain though. Wilbur has a couple of ways to generate contour maps. I wonder why people aren't taking more advantage of that? Contours are soooooo SEXAY!

At the moment I've not added any place names in the data. I need to upgrade to Global Mapper 12 cos that has a few nifty features like geological symbols, (we do have a geological map), river and watershed creation, underground features, and 3D features...hmmmm I'd love to map Moria!  :Cool: 

** Hey, I'm now a proud owner of World Machine 2.2 Professional!! Didn't cost me a penny as I'm on the testing team wooohooo!! **

monks

----------


## ravells

lol, funnily enough I'm just looking at the whole contour thing myself and going back to getting vector contours from Fractal Terrains Pro. At the moment I export the FT pro map into CC2 and then save the CC2 map as Enhanced Windows Metafile (which takes vector info) and then load into Serif Drawplus (which is like Illustrator) so I can work on the map. So far the results have been OK, but even a small area of land generates a huge number of nodes and lines, so I've got some crashes / overload issues to work through if I want anything magnificently big with contours. Using Drawplus's autotrace feature looks like it's faster and produces 'cleaner' vectors which is what I'm looking at the the moment. 

I think people here tend not to use contours as a whole because they are not very 'fantasy-ish' which is a pity.

----------


## Midgardsormr

> Hi Midgardsormr, the utility was not written by me, but I can post info about it over there I guess. Did you once have an account on Deviant Art by any chance?


That's okay, it's for discussion of software, no matter who makes it. 

Yes, I have a Deviant Art account, but I don't know that I've ever actually used it. It's likely, though, that what you've seen wasn't me; somebody else grabbed my name before I got there. It happens from time to time on the bigger websites, especially since Final Fantasy XI named one of their servers after me, but _I'm_ the original! Accept no substitutes! I guess to really clinch it I should claim the midgardsormr.com and .net domains; looks like the last guy to have the .com didn't renew.

Looks like my DA account is Midgaard77, which is what I always try to fall back on if somebody's taken my primary handle.

----------


## monks

Ahhh yes!- all this brings back memories hahaha!...even just sorting out a workflow can take a long time,...and pain- interesting workflow- one I'm not familiar with. It's a LOT worse if you are using large files. Back when I started this caper, I was limited to Photoshop rasters- for producing what were ultimately going to be vectors, but I had no choice,- PS wastheonly prog capable of handling the huge files. The files are not that huge, not what would considered huge these days, but this was way back. I did find an obscure route via PS -> Wintopo Pro and Global Mapper ultimately.My problem was I had to vectorise all those raster contours. WinTopo Pro back then had a one click raster to vector feature. Saved me a lot of time!...but I still had to tag all the vectors with heights....ughgh.
 I've never used the metafile, but I was aware of it. Autotrace sounds a lot like the raster to vector thing.

 Yep, and you know why it's not very fantasy-ish? Because none of the fantasy map makers of the past ever went to the trouble of building a terrain! They didin't have the tools and in addition it's a bit of a pain in the ass to do it Tolkien did to a certain extent (well to a large extent actually), and those who followed on: Strachey, Fonstad.

monks

monks

----------


## monks

It's quite a memorable name. The guy on there was involved with terrain programming I seem to remember. My name is taken quite a lot, but I'm never sure if it's something I've previously signed up to in the dim and distant past  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Hey monks, did you check this thread ? Nice mountains !

----------


## monks

Yeh, they are beauties!

----------


## monks

Update. The new quad is back in Global Mapper:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...bigscreen2.jpg



I've got  a real problem with the way I'm working. The roundrtripping between GM and WM isn't working.
When I get the terrain back into GM, the terrain heights are out at the coastline. Caused by a problem I had with getting the first quad back into GM.
That's produced a knock on effect for this new quad and now the coastline in the south is all wrong along that quad. It's out by 68 m.
I can solve it by doing some more work on the quad in Leveller or Wilbur. The problem is I'm going to have this every time now I reimport a new terrain.

I could possibly fix it by altering the coastline contours in GM and running interpolation on those coastlines.

I'm going to try and fix the problems I have and then I'm going to bite the bullet and get the whole terrain into WM or some other app.
That means getting 8GB for starters. The problem with the current way I work is I'm using Leveller and to a lesser extent Wilbur.Leveller is crumby with memory. I get out of memory so easily with that app. 20 K, the current res I'm working at, is never going to go in Leveller, even
with 8 GB, it being a 32 bit app. I very much doubt it will go in Wilbur 64 either.

I'll see how easy and effective this interpolation is. If it's easy I'll consider staying with the current way oif working.

There's also another possible solution. World Machine has a relatively new feature called Render Extents. One can set mulitplie render extents of different resolutions.I've never used it before.I'm hoping that this will allow me to do essentially the same thing as Grome
does. Have the whole 20K terrain in the tmd, but only load the system with the current render extent. I know that I can load 20K into WM, I did it before when I had 8 GB of memory.
I'm enquiring about it now...

I've installed more memory...fingers crossed it doesn't start misbehaving...

I've just realised that some of my layers in Global Mapper are in different projections. Hmmm, that could be the cause of my problems.

monks

----------


## monks

Solved most of the problems I was having last week.

Here's some pics.










http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...screen3D13.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../screen3D3.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../screen3D7.jpg


...onwards...!!

monks

----------


## ravells

This is looking seriously juicy!!!! Go go!

----------


## monks

juicy?...:-D ...

The quad now after removing those edges.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...s/Edges_01.jpg

Still more to do. I'll have to create a new quad combining the two quads and roundtrip it.I'll give it a go- failing that, it's contours in gm.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...s/Edges_02.jpg


monks

----------


## monks

I've ironed out all of the square edges in the model. There were lots of problems created in water flow.The only way I could do that with any satisfaction was in Global Mapper using contours.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file.../Mapupdate.jpg

The top left will have to be done in the next modelling phase. That will be either, another roundtrip with a quad covering the whole of the west coast, or the whole terrain in WM.
I'm undecided what to do right now. There are things I need to do in WM which I'm not entirely sure I can yet- with ease anyway. I tend to do those things in painterly progs such as Leveller or Wilbur. 

Before I decide what to do, I'm going to improve the model with contours so that the major rivers flow correctly. I'll limit this to the main rivers- if I do it for all of them I'll be here til doomsday.  :p

monks

----------


## monks

Improved rivers...high vertical exaggeration 





http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...rrivers_01.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...rrivers_03.jpg




monks

----------


## monks

We're currently getting our terrain into a planetary renderer. These are initial test shots.


















http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...s/Proland2.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...s/Proland3.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...s/Proland4.png


The software is ProLand by Eric Bruneton. Eric kindly released some code from an early demo. RedRobes is getting our terrain into it.

You can see more about ProLand here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggLYT...eature=related

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Yes, this Proland is really awesome. In fact there are a number of these kind of renderers out there very few of which we have any way of getting our DEM into so its very kind of Eric to lend us some API for that. As you can see I lashed it together with nearest neighbor sampling so the normals are all screwed. It was expected but I need an hour or two to fix that up before its really ready.

Incidentally, these planet renderers are in  REALTIME. Its really awesome to see it going. The demo Eric has allowed us to integrate with is his old one and were only getting height and colour API calls. His new one has much more in it and, well, its just amazing to be honest. I have to keep expanding where I think we will all be in a few years from now w.r.t graphics.

----------


## monks

Now you know what I've been banging on about all this time with flying over it in WM.  :Smile:  WM has it's strengths in terrain editing. ProLand is way beyond those rt capabilities...I'm looking forward to seeing it in action!
 I think a 40K terrain will look pretty amazing in this. No hurry though, we're moving in the right direction  :Wink: 

monks

----------


## guyanonymous

OK. This sounds very interesting.

----------


## monks

:-D Hi guy. Yes, the anti alias needs sorting out but MineCraft has a bit more of an issue with that hehe.

 If you're ever looking for a crazy project to get involved in, this is it!  :Wink:  6 years and counting for me...

monks

----------


## monks

River tests. I ran the terrain through Wilbur using the precipiton and incise flows. I'm not using basin fill here.
 The pics show the terrain in World Machine with some erosion added in there. Apart from some of the results we've had with GTS, these are the best rivers we've had to date.
Note, the terrain here was processed without any fractal detail added.This is as about as basic in appearance as the terrain gets. I added 2 or 3% noise in Wilbur.






http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests5.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests5a.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests6.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests6a.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests7.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests7a.png




monks

----------


## Redrobes

I grabbed another few hours tonight and coded the linear interpolation. Its slowed down the data file generation by a bit since its requesting 4x as many coordinates from the terrain but, as expected, its solved the 'dodgy normals' problems. So from a bit of a distance this looks well cool. This is with the 10K map tho so next step is to try the 40K one... Mmmmm.

EDIT -- thought id render a similar view to last time just to be sure it really is working. That looks much better now.

----------


## monks

This looks awesome!! I can't wait to fly around it. :-D
 Yes, I can see the difference now with the normals. I think once we get our data in place with the Earth data we should use this as the new website front page image.

 One can only imagine what this will look like fully eroded and textured...o_O


monks

----------


## Ascension

Lookin' great, guys.  One of these days you'll have it all done and can relax.

----------


## monks

Thanks Ascension.. I did take about 18 months of a break from this but then some very irresponsible person posted a map in the ME-DEM forums and started it all up again haha! I had a hard disk crash and lost some work, and I was busy with with my band. A week of pain redoing the work got the ball rolling again. Things have moved in leaps and bounds since then. Finally got the rivers to where I want them and the terrain is wicked in ProLand. We're hoping to get it into another planet renderer some time this year which has trees and ocean rendering. *We hope*.


monks

----------


## ravells

I hope so too, this is just looking flipping gorgeous!

----------


## monks

Thanks Ravells, things are really starting to take shape!

Got some good news. RedRobes and I were asked by the guys at OuTerra if they could use our data to test their new map compression software and beta test their planetary rendering engine and sandbox world editor. The ProLand demo is *amazing*, but we'll be able to do a lot more in OuTerra. In the sandbox editor we'll be able able to build features, import our distribution maps from Global Mapper for stuff like roads, forests, etc, and have ocean rendering. 

OuTerra
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeoT_cz2nC0

For more info visit: 
http://outerra.blogspot.com/

Exciting times indeed!

monks

----------


## monks

I've got the Anduin flowing. So far I've done about a quarter of the total 
area I wanted to look at. It is quite a big job this one.



You can see the original rivers in Global Mapper (from the topo) vs the eroded river valleys
It's not prefect but I'd be happy to run with those.

There's just one point where the main course stops flowing. It's 
ridiculously close- something like a few pixels where it's interrupted.
But it continues immediately afterwards. I've not included all of the 
watershed at the top in this run, so the flow may be a little more,
so that might solve it,, if Wilbur erosion works at all like that.

As long as we can output the new rivers as masks in Wilbur, we shouldn't 
have problems. Joe said we have a few options, so I'm optimisitc about that.

There's a little bit too much incise erosion on the east bank for me- should 
be smoother, but that's a minor quibble. I'd blur that area and add gently rolling hill 
noise anyway. Tolkien does describe that vista.

Back to it! 

monks

----------


## monks

I've had to take a little time out from the the rivers. Eric, the Proland dev is kindly letting us have an improved demo. We should have sea specularity and lights for population centres.So I've created the following layers- long overdue actually.

Cities
Towns
Hamlets
Citadels
Towers and Keeps
Beacon Towers
Ruins
Monasteries
Burial Sites

You can see a map of them here:

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...ations_BIG.jpg





There's barely anything left on the map now that hasn't been digitised. I think bridges are the only things left.

In ProLand we can weight the lights and we can add dim lights to the roads too- bit of artistic license! 
We should have a vid soon.)

monks

----------


## Starbuck777

Hello,

 I was referred to you forum by Joeri Timmerman @ the Fan-Modules Yahoo Group.

I'm looking for a heightmap of Arda...Middle-Earth, in RAW format or another lossless format. to be used in a 3D rendering we're working on.

Thanks

----------


## monks

Hi Starbuck. I suggest registering on ME-DEM. http://www.me-dem.me.uk/


You can reg on the boards here: http://www.me-dem.org/

 What kind of game are you making, what kind of renderer? Is it a mod or commercial?

monks

----------


## Starbuck777

Hello monks,

I'll check out those links.

I am part of a small gaming group that wants to play MERP, but we live in different parts of the country. So we have been trying to find an online way to continue our characters adventures. We are using Blender to make some of the assets and will be using Unity as the "gaming " engine. We are collecting as much data on Middle-Earth as possible, for table-top as well as online RPG, hence my previous heightmap post. 

I would not call it a mod, we originally wanted to use Oblivion to mod, but it's only single player.

Thanks for the info

----------


## monks

Hi, that sounds cool. I much prefer multi player and even more co-op mode, but it's so rarely supported. Still yet to finish Oblivion- been far too busy making this terrain model! 
 We were approached a few years ago by a team who wanted to make a BattleField 2 mod. The deal was that we let them use our assets, in return for using their assets (that they could) such as 3D models. 
 If you register on ME-DEM we can discuss it there. 

Cheers,
monks

----------


## Redrobes

So is this a true role playing thing then or more of a MMORPG ? If its RPG then using a VTT would be a good way to go and therefore a 2D map with top down icons. Its quite extreme to go 3D for RPG. If you do then the res of the terrain would be very low at character scale where the action would be. Even a very very high res terrain would be a few hundred feet if not more for the whole land of Arda. Also, if doing this in 3D, what would you use for the towns and cities ? When 2D you have the maps for them from various places.

----------


## monks

Hey, this is probably somewhere around 20-30K in res.

A couple of the mountain ranges need sorting out for this run (they're too high), and most of them ultimately.
Eventually, I'll model the hills more fractally- give them better drainage and they'll look much more authentic.
There are floodplains and beaches in here too  :Smile: 

When we upscale it, it will loose a bit of the noise. I think there should be a few more smoother plains in there but hey, this is a demo.
In any case, we're certainly not short on terrain features for OuTerra's fractals to get hold of.
 We're working on a 40K terrain for ProLand and OuTerra.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._02%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._03%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._04%20copy.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._05%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._06%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._07%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._08%20copy.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._09%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._10%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._11%20copy.jpg
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._12%20copy.jpg

monks

----------


## Ryan K

Sweet, dude!

----------


## Ascension

Looks fantabulous.

----------


## monks

For anyone interested, the ME-DEM crew had our picture taken : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNP7R1-cBvA

 RedRobes is at the back with the red tie (of course). That's me on the right. My hat slipped. 
...haha

monks

----------


## Ascension

Huh...I thought for sure that you were the second from left.   :Smile:

----------


## Ryan K

Well, it's good to finally be able to put a name to a face. Word.

----------


## monks

:Smile:  it tickled me that.

 Starbuck, did you reg on the ME-DEM boards? 

We've got a new 40K demo out to Brano, the OuTerra dev. Eric Bruneton has given us an improved demo of ProLand.
I'm currently having a play with Terragen 2.  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## monks

Been busy! We put together a 40K terrain demo recently. We'll be outputting distribution maps and textures from GTS for ProLand, OuTerra and Terragen.



You can check out some shots here of the terrain in OuTerra and ProLand:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...nt/gallery.htm


I'm using an 8192 terrain in Terragen at the moment. The sea is created by applying a water shader to a sphere object. Rivers and lakes can be created in a few ways.
Seer's method of using heightfields:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/re...gen_WIP_01.png

Or BigBen's method of using a plane object.
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/re...gen_WIP_02.png

Both will prove useful. The idea is set up a project that can be used for a variety of shots. We'd like to eventually output xml from GTS so we can streamline working with GTS texture maps in TG.


monks

----------


## Ascension

I really dig that first screenie there, the other Outerra shots are pretty good, too.

----------


## monks

We've got a better demo of ProLand now Ascension- it can handle greater res, but it's going to take us a while to process and render the 40 K map.

monks

----------


## monks

After working on this project for a long time now, I've increasingly been dissatisfied with the results from terrain generators for *certain aspects* of terrain modelling. Having tried modelling a complete mountain range with splines in World Machine I got some pretty good results, the best yet, but the effort required is very intensive, not to mention a huge load on your computer system.
Spliines are fantastic- no doubt, but it still requires a lot of manual effort to get those mountain folds= the structures that define the river systems and valleys. If we had a procedural way of generating splines in convincing structures to describe ridges and rivers, then that would pretty much solve that. But I'm guessing the problem is not trivial- and devs are busy people! 
Also, now we're using the planet renderers, I'm beginning to see shots from orbit of our terrain compared to real world terrain. It really shows up the differences.

I tried a new workflow using real terrain data. I think the mountains look better now when viewed from orbit..



They need a fair bit of work though because the valleys don't naturally fall into the surrounding terrain. I can do that in something like Leveller manually. I've pretty much been doing that anyway with the old method, so it's not actually any more work.
The Alps tend to fall away in height to the south, so I'd have to apply to some height offsetting in that area to beef up the mountains around Isengard.
We could also extend this idea to hills too as we have distribution maps for those. We might even be able to extend it to every part of the model synthesising the real world terrain with the underlying surface. I've got an idea that uses watersheds- build the terrain via watersheds. That would create the most believable river systems.

monks

----------


## monks

Been playing with bits and bats. Quick demo of Carn Dum in Sketchup. 



monks

----------


## Redrobes

The new 40K map has completed processing and some sample images are up on the Dev gallery.

http://me-dem.me.uk/galleries/Development/gallery.htm

Still some problems to fix up but its heading in the right direction.

----------


## Ascension

Great shots.

----------


## torstan

That really is looking amazing.

----------


## Redrobes

The pic really doesn't do it justice so I thought I would post this little diagram to show what we have been doing for all this time over the last few weeks. There was a bit of a screw up with the light map so I fixed it for this one tile and placed it into context. When Monks does the run it should fix this for all the tiles but then thats another two weeks of processing to get to it. Still, Proland does its own light mapping so the next stage plan is to see it in that app. Outerra does not use any colour map at all. It generates its own.

----------


## monks

I like that last pic! Yes, it's a bloody good map man.
 We've talked about the changes we need to make if we can. The snow coverage and lightmap being the biggest immediate changes.
I didn't know I was doing a run...lol Well, no problemo obviously. 

I could get you masks for the erosion on the mountains from World Machine if you want them. I don't know what would be involved in incorporating those.
I think it'll look amazing in ProLand. Getting our masks into OuTerra will be further out.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

> I didn't know I was doing a run...lol Well, no problemo obviously.


Heh - I did kinda take it for granted that after you have put so much modelling into it you would want a copy of the map rendered ! Otherwise I would have to get about 35Gb to you. Look at this pic  :Very Happy:  68,000 files - no way am I zipping that up LOL.

The ViewingDale set tho is 4800 files at 2.5Gb so that could fit on a DVD and I could post it.




> I could get you masks for the erosion on the mountains from World Machine if you want them.


I dunno, do I want these ? What I think I need is a greyscale map or HF2 map with nice rolled off soft edges including valleys etc of where the mountains are and that will multiply in with the real world big peaky set.




> I think it'll look amazing in ProLand. Getting our masks into OuTerra will be further out.


Yup - looking forward to flying around real time in Proland. Don't know if it will handle the res tho. I know we can do 20K but I have never had it working higher than that yet.

----------


## monks

68 huh...do you not want to put them on the ftp...? :-D 

What res is the ProLand 11 setting at?

So you need a mask of the mountain areas with the edges blurred?

monks

----------


## monks

We've finished the texture run in make and GTS. Still a list of things that need improving, but I think this is looking pretty sweet. These are shots in ViewingDale. The texture is 40k x 40K. It took about 5 days flat out on a quad core.








More pics in the gallery here:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...nt/gallery.htm

monks

----------


## Redrobes

That dark patch out to sea is not supposed to be there and also you have Arial type font instead of the tolkien styled one but yeah, its looking good. I am about 3/4 there now so only another two days or so to go...  :Frown:

----------


## monks

Do you mean the island near the Anduin exit? Tolfalas?

monks

----------


## Redrobes

No, out to sea... compare... You can also see the text font is different. That could be fixed easily but I dont know for sure why there is the big grey kraken waiting out there. It might be because there was that thing with GM where it generates HF2/HFZ's with the unknown height of -9999999 m or something like that. It could be that the entire bit of the height out to sea is so low its giving duff texturing for the sea depth. I thought the processing clamped it to -1000m max sea depth. Maybe this didn't happen or it could be something else.

Oh yeah, I should also point out the big horizontal line on mine is just where I am up to in the processing thats all. But it should still be blue underneath when it completes since theres bits finished on mine within the dark area of yours.

----------


## monks

Ah yes. That's the abyssal zone/ continental shelf. That colour distinction appears in the original topo too. Tolfalas island on mine is darker- that's a little odd. Well we can write a short list of things that need fixing. Been a bit busy last couple of days.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Yes its clearly something height related but there's something different about our two systems and apps. Its ok if your busy, I have a few days more of processing to get mine complete anyways. The processing for my next little bit has completed so ill see if I have just covered Tolfalas now...

Ahh yes. It looks pretty similar to me. I don't think this is a problem. I included the name so you can see the font. I'll have to get it to you. If you rerun it will just do the places and run to the end without doing too much - certainly not the whole processing or any texturing.

----------


## monks

Cool, yes it's the same now. Much nicer font that.

monks

----------


## Redrobes

Mine has finished processing and I put it into Proland. Tried level 11 for 40K but it barfed a lot and eat 30Gb of HDD so I had to run at 10 so this is a 20K res proland version of the 40K map - Monks, mail me and ill get you the new builder app. Anyway, here is a shot of the Isengard area. Its nice but it gets a bit hazy at low levels that wipe a lot of the detail near to the ground. I dont know if there are options to control that but anyway its great at world distances and is the best we have till we see the Outerra engine in action.

Ok heres another one or two - Sunrise over Mindolluin and the Ephel Duath.

----------


## monks

Beauties! Check your mail.  :Wink: 

monks

----------


## monks

Ok, just a quick update guys, I think the only way the ME-DEM terrain is going to stand up to scrutiny from orbit in a planetary renderer like OuTerra, is to use real terain.I think if we had tools like Howard Zhou's poission seam fixer and l-system splines we'd be able to fake it pretty well, but looks like they're not going to be here for a wee while. 

I've decided to start with the mountains as they can be dropped in easily. Mordor is the most challenging of the ranges- it's the most contrived so you need to do a lot of shaping of the dem. I've hashed out a new workflow using 16 bit pngs. I'd really like to use Photoshops CS5's puppet warp tool in future, but I'm still running XP64 here! :/

I'm using 90m SRTM 4 in this. The dem in OuTerra is at 40K, ie, 100m res, so it's a good match. The only downside with using r-w data is the fixed resolution, but I reckon we could get away with going to 50 or 25 m res and still have it looking good. Mordor uses the Carpathian mountains as the basis for it, if you check it out you'll quickly see why  :Smile: 

At the moment the slopes along the perimeter are a bit severe- depending on your taste. For real terrain they are perhaps but it could be argued that Mordor is an unnatural place- more a giant fortress than a mountain range. Robes has written a nifty blender so that should help a lot. The immediate goal is to use his texturer on real terrain I've sourced from SRTM v4 for those mountain ranges I've not modelled- almost all right now- to get them into Outerra.











monks

----------


## Redrobes

Each post has a max of 5 images so here are the rest of monks images in a new post:

----------


## monks

Oh balls! lol...haha...I went back into the editor and the code had all changed...and I thought to myself "has this flaming editor got a mind of its own?!"...

monks

----------


## Redrobes

There - all fixed up. Nice images BTW. So thats Mt Doom just left of center on image 1 ? Cool.

----------


## monks

:Smile:  Ta..yeh Mt Doom with its own little crater and lava flows!

monks

----------


## Steel General

I've said it before, but this is some really cool stuff here guys!

----------


## monks

Thanks Steel General! 


monks

----------


## Redrobes

Whilst Monks is doing his manual modelling of the mountains by using patches of real world mountains applied, I have been trying to script apply the real world mountains as part of the ongoing automated scripting system dev. The problem is that even tho Mordor is quite a large area and will take a lot of effort to model, its not a large part of the map as a whole so there could be a years worth of mountain patch application if we didn't do some of it as a process.

So I have a couple of test images here showing how those might be added in using a completely automated system.

The mountains are too high in both cases but the ones on the left (Ered Nimrais) are waaay too high and the fall off is a bit too steep but still, the principle is there. The area done is a rectangle that goes to the obvious cut off on the left to just to the left part of the 'D' in "Mt Doom" and not beyond. Beyond is the old style mountains we had but before Monks new ones as displayed in the images from the posts above.

I would be interested in hearing general criticisms.

----------


## monks

This is nice stuff! The blend is especially nice and the interior mountains, while not perfect to the trained eye, are still "good enough", easily. We just have to be careful with the heights. As I said, we can't have everything at Himalaya heights. We're pretty much doubling the consensual heights for the mountains in M-E...I've not got a problem with that, it'll make for a grander experience, and it does actually parallel real world mountains heights. 
 I don't know how the Mistys will look scaled to that really high altitude, considering they cover way less land mass than the Himalayas- doubling their height- hmmm, no, I think it'll be fine. But at least we're now in a position to see! //wink

 monks

----------


## Redrobes

If I get a few hours spare, ill lower the mask height for these mountains and try some on the Mistys and see how they look. Incidentally, do you have some average spot heights for some of these ranges. What would you say those mts at Mordor should have been, and what should the Nimrais and Mistys be as well. Quote what you want me to set them to and ill give it a go and get some 'proper' renders of them to see how they might look in a full run.

----------


## Redrobes

A couple of lower height mask runs. I think something between the two would be perfect. I got some spot heights off of Monks so ill set that up to be accurate to those now which is almost exactly half way between the first and this version. A full map of mountains like this would look cool.

----------


## Redrobes

I have been working more on the mountains of ME. Arandil, a member here and fellow medemmer has found a bunch of real mountain tiles and I have added some code to my GTS to rotate the height or flip it. By writing a script I have randomly picked a tile from his set and randomly rotated and flipped it and built up an array of the 40x40 tiles. By blending these together into one seamless expanse we hope to create a mountain range mask that we can apply to any masked in mountainous regions on the map. Its easier than trying to make the stuff by hand.

So now that I have all 1600 tiles, I thought I would share a 4x4 set of tiles blended together to make a 4096x4096 pixel mountain map. Apologies for the image being JPG but it blew the byte limit in PNG. At least this is better than the 5Gb of mountains I have on my drive now. Also, this is only 8 bit greyscale image instead of the full 16bit were using. But if you either add this to your map or use it as an extra height field in a continental map then it would be useful. Oh and this one is seamless within the 4x4 but not wrap around the edges. Anyway, hope its big enough.

Gotta try this out with the full MeDem map next then we chuck the whole thing at Outerra and see how it looks with real mountains in it.  :Smile:

----------


## monks

Something went awry with my forum notifications. 

The ME-DEM project has been given kind permission by Cameni and AngryPig to post some development shots of our terrain within Outerra.


We recently moved over to an entirely new workflow in ME-DEM for building the terrain. We've been testing whether that would be feasable of itself and also testing the specifics of getting it into Outerra and how Outerra renders it with its procedural fractals at the sub 90m scale.


We got our initial terrain into Outerra which was built on our old workflow using procedural terrain generators. After viewing it from orbit and having seen  the real earth data in Outerra (SRTM v4 at 90m), it was pretty obvious that it didn't stand up very well to scrutiny from high orbit.   :Razz: 
 While procedurals terrain generators are great are small scale (sub planetary- Outerra is BIIIIIG!!) terrain modelling, they don't currently have tools for creating convincing large scale structures like continental mountain ranges. So we decided to use real earth data instead...


We're currently using two methods: a more traditional manual modelling approach using real terrain from SRTM sources in Photoshop, Leveller, and World Machine and procedural tile blending of tiles from the same data. We use Global Mapper to select and export the tiles.


 The manual modelling of the mountain ranges is the long term goal- but it _will_ be longer term. the procedural approach will be handled by Robes' texturer and take care of any terrain I've not modelled manually in the meantime.


 First up was Mordor. Bear in mind that in the future the texturer will be set up to incorporate user defined textures. We're still with the default Earth texture settings here.

 The highest point on the terrain is at around 16,000 ft. Not sure where that is exactly...but everything looks good. We've used artistic license and extended the height of the Mordor mountains. We're probably going to roughly double the height of the mountains in Middle Earth over our previous estimates.
 I used the Carpathians as the basis for Mordor- sorry to people who live there, no offence  ;D. The problem with that was that they are not young mountains like say the Himalayas with all of those sharp glaciated ridges, so I had to apply ridge sharpening in World Machine. The Photoshop processing removed some of the high frequency detail from the terrain so I had to replace that procedutally while preserving the flatness of the valleys.

 These are all shots of just the lower right quad of the ME-DEM terrain. I'll post some shots later with the entire map.


Valleys



Ridges




Another problem we had was creating a good transition from mountains to lowlands. This turned out to be not too difficult to solve.




continued...

monks

----------


## monks

One of the spooky mountains- this is really cool when you travel across the Udun crater- it's huge and very evil looking up close   :Cool:  Just to get an idea of the scale of this, it takes about 20 minutes to travel across the crater of Udun "running" along the ground.




I added a sea of mist and took some pics- you get an almost tropical feel.


In this one the mist fills the caldera of Udun. The Morannon Gate (the location of the battle at the end of The Return of the King) is at the south at the gap in the crater. To get a sense of the scale of this, the arrow in the pic points to the summit of the tower in the previous pic just poking its head above the mist!





 Here's Mt Doom
















I was playing around in World Machine with Voronoi noise and came up with the beginning of a surface for the plains of Mordor.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...or_surface.png

It'd be really sweet to be able to add to this plain the occasional displacements like these: http://blackheart6004.deviantart.com...hear-163303491
Terragen 2 has a workflow which can export displacements as meshes to 3Ds Max. That's one possibility, Outerra will no doubt have procedural solutions too.   :Wink: 


monks

----------


## ravells

That is just jaw droppingly amazing, both in terms of beauty and in scale.

----------


## monks

Thanks ravells. We're gonna do a run of the whole map in the next week, I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes out!

monks

----------


## Silverleaf

I have to say I've been following this thread from early September of 07 when I found the CG website. Your work on this is down right brilliant, and the idea of mapping an entire fantasy world in 3D is right up my alley. I've always harbored a desire to map Tolkien's world and Steven R. Donaldson's The Land (from the Thomas Covenant series).

I may have missed it in previous posts, but whats the long term goal of the project? Is this strictly a labor of love? or do you harbor some ideas about a "bigger picture" with the finished product?

As an animation student in my 5th year of college, I admire your tenacity and wish you a ton of good luck.  :Cool: 

Cheers,

----------


## monks

Hi Silverleaf, thanks a bunch!


 We've spent so long over this project, and I've learnt a huge amount over the years. I now know that I could do a heightmap of any fantasy
world that had ref maps/ topo maps very quickly. I'd say in months rather than in years. We've evolved our workflow over time, and the use of Robes' procedural texturer would be part of that workflow.
 So, what we're doing right now is moving towards a full run of the map with real world mountains applied procedurally (apart from Mordor which will be the hand modelled version seen in the pics). That's the immediate goal. We've been held up for the last 3 weeks because the software I'm using has a major bug which is preventing me from outputting terrain tiles. So, waiting on a fix for that.
 After that, the next goal will be completely covering the terrain with dem data, using terrain sourced by type from the real world.
 There will be some (lots) improvements in the renderer to (Outerra) along the way of course. Can't say exactly what due to nda, but the next shots should take advantage of a new feature. Expect the terrain to look a lot more like the Tolkien maps.  :Smile: )


 Another thing we could develop more is textures. 


 After that..? well, I'm up for modelling another world just to prove that it can be done way quicker. The two that sprang to mind are Narnia and Thomas Covenant- yeh I read those when I was ata school!  :Smile: 


 What animation are you studying? If you wanted to get involved with thew project, feel free to join the boards. 


http://www.me-dem.org/


some more pics:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/


Cheers,
monks

----------


## Silverleaf

> I now know that I could do a heightmap of any fantasy world that had ref maps/ topo maps very quickly. I'd say in months rather than in years. We've evolved our workflow over time, and the use of Robes' procedural texturer would be part of that workflow.


Woah, that excellent to hear. So which is preferred, topo or simple reference?




> After that..? well, I'm up for modelling another world just to prove that it can be done way quicker. The two that sprang to mind are Narnia and Thomas Covenant- yeh I read those when I was ata school!


Now your talking! The Land is a major draw for me because like Middle Earth, that world seems alive to me more than the one I live in. I hadn't thought of Narnia but perhaps you might look at the world of Harn (Columbia Games).




> What animation are you studying? If you wanted to get involved with thew project, feel free to join the boards.


My main focus is 3D Studio Max, although I must admit to being more interested in the graphic/post-design aspect of it all. I'll have my Associates at the end of this semester, and then another year for the Bachelors. After that I plan to go on for the Masters so that I can teach animation at the collegiate level. 

Thanks for the link to the ME site, I've bookmarked it and will spend the next few hours over there absorbing the material and images you've posted.

Really, and this is certainly the uber-geek in me speaking, I've not been this excited about an ongoing project since I first heard that Stephen R. Donaldson was revisiting The Land. I can hardly wait for 2013 for the 4th and final book of the Last Chronicles to hit. The world better not end in 2012, cause I will be royally irritated.  :Cool: 

Please keep posting updates and I'll continue to drool.

Cheers,

----------


## monks

Gotta be a topo really. I had a brief lok at the Covenant map the other night- that and Narnia. Both look pretty small compared to Tolkien. definitely doable. I guess you'd want ot get a lot of the details right- but that'd depend at what detail you built it.


I forgot that he wrote the last 4 books..! I've not read those.


There are other worlds that'd be more challenging, like you say Harn. That'd be really nice to see, and I half think it must have already been done surely. World of GreyHawk, Runequest, Powers and Perils...Rolemaster worlds, the list goes on!  :Smile: )


 Good luck with the studying. Yeh, I think you'd get a bit more job security from teaching!


 Haha, the world ending..? that's warped! Yeh, I should read them at some point. Nothing wrong with being a geek anyway- most of the pioneers in computer games came from the pen and paper roleplaying world- even Carmack ran his own Campaign!

Good news!..I think the software bug should be fixed within the week, so we can crack on  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## Silverleaf

> There are other worlds that'd be more challenging, like you say Harn. That'd be really nice to see, and I half think it must have already been done surely.


Well, there was a thread at Lythia (the official home of the Harn Forum) sometime back where a guy was designing some 3d models and had modded what was going to be a single town. He had just the basic terrain laid out, otherwise nothing substantial has been done with the world proper. Truth be told, I have no interest in modding the entire world of Harn - the mainland is called Kelestia. The island of Harn, now that is a different story all together.  :Cool: 

The Last Chronicles is, IMHO, the best work that Stephen R. Donaldson has done in the series. Well worth the read.

Cheers,

----------


## monks

Didn't get a notification of reply for this thread in my inbox...hmmm. So apologies for not responding. 
 Yeh, I bet there's loads of personal projects like that that have come and gone over the years, Minas Tirith project for one (unbelievable that that all went to waste like it did) I suppose the hard part is finding a permanent home for them, for the assets. I think at least with ME-DEM we've been around for quite a long time now. We're not quite there yet but I'm hoping that in a month from now we'll have a version 1.0 finally...!

 Well, I've got my license for World Machine 2.2 Pro so we can move on with the project again now!  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## monks

After a bit of trouble (bazungus understatement ha!), I've combined the Mordor quad with full tile set and added hills, lowlands and wetlands. I've also added flowmaps from Wilbur to add tributaries to the rivers. Not sure how well that will work out but I though I'd try it. 

www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...1/WM_tmds/Pic_01.png

www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...1/WM_tmds/Pic_02.png


The next step is to build the tile set to put through Robes' Make and create the mountain masks which control the mountains blended in with the texturer.  

monks

----------


## CP Sennett

Some great work here guys.

----------


## monks

Thanks CP  :Wink:  Hopefully we'll be able to post some pics of progress in a couple of weeks.

monks

----------


## Ihmemies

Correct me if I'm wrong.. but apparently there are no files available for public yet?

I'm planning to do Minas Amon in Minecraft (I know it's been done a thousand times) and I'm in need of a b&w heightfield.

Would you happen to have a heightfield of the White Mountains? A smallish 2-4km area with some mountains and a small part of Pelennor would be more than enough  :Smile: 

Making realistic, good-looking terrain is not that easy and seems you have a lot of experience in doing that... Anyways, whatever the answer, thanks in advance and good luck with the project. Hopefully it will get finished & published some day!

Edit: seems my reply sits in some Adminstrator limbo, and I can't use private messages, so I suppose I can only wait >_>

----------


## monks

Hi Ihmemies, sure you can.  :Smile:  We're currently in the middle of a build in which we're adding much more realistic mountains to the whole map. I'm actually running a test at the moment on that precise area you're looking for. If all goes well, I'll be able to let you have it within the week. We've just got a wee problem to iron out.
 Btw, do I know you from somewhere else..? From Yahoo Fan modules perhaps? :-D

We took the ME-DEM ftp off public access because I found a lot of my Tolkien research on a Chinese site that was earning money for hosting document files. The woman was making money from my stuff, indirectly. She didn't ask me for permission to take it either- probably used a crawler bot to get the files. Since we don't get a lot of people seeking to use our stuff, we didn't see any benefit to keeping access open anymore. If you register at ME-DEM we could work something out better  :Wink: 

monks

----------


## Ihmemies

> Hi Ihmemies, sure you can.  We're currently in the middle of a build in which we're adding much more realistic mountains to the whole map. I'm actually running a test at the moment on that precise area you're looking for. If all goes well, I'll be able to let you have it within the week. We've just got a wee problem to iron out.


I will wait then. Minecraft has excellent tools for geometric shape generation but no good natural terrain editing tools. Map editors have possibility to import heightmaps so I was interested in trying out what kind of results it produces. 




> Btw, do I know you from somewhere else..? From Yahoo Fan modules perhaps? :-D


Only service I've used from Yahoo is flickr. I found me-dem project only today so probably we don't know each other  :Razz: 




> We took the ME-DEM ftp off public access because I found a lot of my Tolkien research on a Chinese site that was earning money for hosting document files. The woman was making money from my stuff, indirectly. She didn't ask me for permission to take it either- probably used a crawler bot to get the files. Since we don't get a lot of people seeking to use our stuff, we didn't see any benefit to keeping access open anymore. If you register at ME-DEM we could work something out better


That is understandable. I registered at me-dem.org's forums with same nickname.

----------


## monks

I can give you this terrain I've been faffing around with.
This doesn't exaclty match our project data, but then we've not really mapped the terrain down to the resolution that you'll be working at, I think it'll be good enough for what you want.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...n_strata5b.png


How much of the mountain do you want?
What file format and resolution?

monks

----------


## monks

We've just finished the make process on the tiles with the new r-w mountains added with the texturer.
 I think we can call this a v 1.0. 

 There are a few imperfections, but on the whole I'm really pleased with the results.

 You can download the entire map here. Be warned, large file!
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...0K_VD_ScreenGrab.png


Mordor
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...eens/make/Mordor.png

The Sea of Rhun mts 
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...creens/make/Rhun.png

North east and the north west areas
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te.../Screens/make/ne.png

www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te.../Screens/make/nw.png

Mirkwood mts.
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ns/make/Mirkwood.png

Grey mts
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/make/GreyMts.png


I've been adding the names to the map recently. Places, rivers ,etc.
At some point I'm going to get this dem and tex into Global Mapper and gen some 
contours off it, add those to the vectors and then output a vector map.

For the next update we need to correct some of the areas.

Coming up, we'll be getting it into Outerra 

monks

----------


## Redrobes

We got it into Outerra's Anteworld demo last night with the new mountain texturer applied to the terrain so I thought Id post a few pics. We need to fix a few issues but the process is pretty well debugged now so we should be able to make better progress. Monk's Mordor looks great, my mountains look a bit too noisy, I need to tone that down.

----------


## monks

I can't add images on this board. In both Firefox and Chrome, the page goes misty and just sits there.

It's looking great in a lot of places. Yes, it's the first time and we've had a lot of bugs to swat along the way. I've documented everything we did, so it'll be much easier from now on.
There's too much snow generally so we need to lower the mountains since we don't have access to climate controls in Outerrra yet.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...lue_Mts_01.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...lue_Mts_02.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._Mountains.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...untains_02.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...eens/Fjord.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...lf_of_Lhun.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...king_south.jpg

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file..._Mountains.jpg


monks

----------


## Redrobes

For what must have been an unintentional "bug" with the base height vs the mountain peak heights, those fjords sure do look good. I think that's gotta be promoted to "feature" now. We need more of them  :Smile:

----------


## monks

:Smile:  Wow, yeh, they are awesome. Flying up them from the sea is amazing!

monks

----------


## maxsdaddy

Impressive work. I bet if you pasted an ISS window frame in front of these, the average person would really believe
they were looking down from space. Great job.

----------


## Redrobes

I'm sure that Outerra has an ISS model in it. I doubt that they have modeled the insides of it tho. But you never can tell with those guys...

----------


## Nomadic

> We got it into Outerra's Anteworld demo last night with the new mountain  texturer applied to the terrain so I thought Id post a few pics. We  need to fix a few issues but the process is pretty well debugged now so  we should be able to make better progress. Monk's Mordor looks great, my  mountains look a bit too noisy, I need to tone that down.


I have been messing around with Outerra and absolutely loving it, how did you do this? I'd love to give this thing a look in Outerra if possible.

----------


## Redrobes

We have been working on the MeDem map for some time - heck... years ! We were looking for a good 3D world renderer and we looked at a few like Proland from Eric Bruneton and Ogre engine etc but Outerra seemed to have the most of what we need. The best bit about it is that for us, we can only create a limited resolution. At the mo its about 100m per pixel. We would like much better than this but its a lot of work shuffling files. But Outerra can create fractal res on the fly in 3D. That was the clincher.

We mailed Outerra team and they thought this was a cool idea to link the world and the engine together so Cameni has helped us get our data into it. I have to say that Outerra shows up any imperfections in your data so we have had to go back and completely redo the mountains and I have wrote two new apps to help insert real mountains into the fantasy map. Now its looking much better but Monks is working away on that right now to solve a few issues and generally get that improved based on the new apps requirements.

We will be releasing it soon with no fixed idea of the date when. It comes down to when it looks good enough. Almost certainly this summer tho. No idea how the data will be delivered. I am guessing via the same system as the earth but that's up to the Outerra team I think. Ours is a fan project & non commercial so it will be free.

I'm just doing the new place name texturer which is a new set of scripts. So hot off the press rendered ohh about 2 minutes ago is this... As you can see theres a few tweaks to iron out in the name tags. Outerra does not have the names and currently does not have a vegetation mask so we cant actually specify a Fangorn there. But I hear they are working on that aspect of it.

edit: Another image of the shire. A few more issues showing up on this map too. Some names are too small and sometimes the shadowing of the map is obscuring the text. A few tweaks and this can be fixed tho.

edit2: Fixed it up a bit but the red line text is not saveable. I think it needs to be bigger.

----------


## Nomadic

> We have been working on the MeDem map for some time - heck... years ! We were looking for a good 3D world renderer and we looked at a few like Proland from Eric Bruneton and Ogre engine etc but Outerra seemed to have the most of what we need. The best bit about it is that for us, we can only create a limited resolution. At the mo its about 100m per pixel. We would like much better than this but its a lot of work shuffling files. But Outerra can create fractal res on the fly in 3D. That was the clincher.
> 
> We mailed Outerra team and they thought this was a cool idea to link the world and the engine together so Cameni has helped us get our data into it. I have to say that Outerra shows up any imperfections in your data so we have had to go back and completely redo the mountains and I have wrote two new apps to help insert real mountains into the fantasy map. Now its looking much better but Monks is working away on that right now to solve a few issues and generally get that improved based on the new apps requirements.
> 
> We will be releasing it soon with no fixed idea of the date when. It comes down to when it looks good enough. Almost certainly this summer tho. No idea how the data will be delivered. I am guessing via the same system as the earth but that's up to the Outerra team I think. Ours is a fan project & non commercial so it will be free.
> 
> I'm just doing the new place name texturer which is a new set of scripts. So hot off the press rendered ohh about 2 minutes ago is this... As you can see theres a few tweaks to iron out in the name tags. Outerra does not have the names and currently does not have a vegetation mask so we cant actually specify a Fangorn there. But I hear they are working on that aspect of it.
> 
> edit: Another image of the shire. A few more issues showing up on this map too. Some names are too small and sometimes the shadowing of the map is obscuring the text. A few tweaks and this can be fixed tho.
> ...


Man that is freaking beautiful. I eagerly await the release of this on Outerra. You guys should be really proud of how far you've come with this thing, it's looking amazing.

----------


## monks

Hi Nomadic, thanks very much! Yes, we want to get it out to people. I'm going to upload a large topo map download shortly to give folks a taster. Improved mt ranges will be in the next version. Followed later in the year by improved hills. One of the things the Outerra devs are working on is the climate model. I believe improvements will allow for user defined textures, and texture/forest, etc placement in the world. It already allows for models/roads of course. We'll be using those texture maps in the pics above to drive the enviroment.
 Once we release, we're looking for folks to get involved and build stuff like buildings, etc. 

monks

----------


## monks

Here's the topographic map generated in Global Mapper, split into 4 tiles at 5000 pixels. This is one quarter resolution of the map. The files are around 30 Mb each. 

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_A1_5K.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_A2_5K.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_B1_5K.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_B2_5K.png

monks

----------


## Nomadic

> Here's the topographic map generated in Global Mapper, split into 4 tiles at 5000 pixels. This is one quarter resolution of the map. The files are around 30 Mb each. 
> 
> http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_A1_5K.png
> 
> http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_A2_5K.png
> 
> http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_B1_5K.png
> 
> http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...arth_B2_5K.png
> ...


Very nice. Just one thing I noticed is that Trollshaws has a spelling error (Trollsahws).  :Wink:

----------


## monks

Thanks. There's probably a few more too. If you spot any more on your travels let us know.  :Wink: 

monks

----------


## Redrobes

I have spotted two issues. One is Balfalas Bay instead of Belfalas Bay. But I notice that on your pic you dont have it so I dont know whats going on there. In another area I can see two labels for a river on top of each other but at slightly different positions and angles. Still, it will all be easier to look at when you run it through and generate the full set.

I ran the process again with yesterdays tweaks added and it looks real nice now. I am particularly pleased with the way its changing the colour of the text depending on where the text is placed. That seems to be working out real well. Heres a little pic showing some sea, some land etc and the text is mainly dark but changing from dark blue to grey or brown.

----------


## monks

I thought I'd revisit my Misty Mountains project from last year. This time using much higher res  terrain. What I've done is to use the base mask I made for use  in the texturer (the one that sits directly on the base), and used that  as a mask multiplier over the height data. With a bit of help from a curves device  (which allows for curve profiling of fall-off) and some erosion it's  looking pretty good in all parts except those really bad parts down the  eastern flank caused by the base dem hills I put in. *tut*
I've also used layout devices to lift up some mountain areas higher  than others. It would be more accurate to Tolkien if I raised up the  eastern flank more. I can do that with either a layout or via levels in  Photoshop. I reckon using the levels is the best way as you get to  contrast the forms better than raise a blob which is what tends to  happen with the layout.
 I'll probably get this into Leveller to smooth out the extreme cliff  edges. I wanted to show the mountains/lowlands interface at a number of  locations to illustrate. There's erosion on this which has helped a  great deal. That could be easily applied during the make process in the  future, and in the current terrain build. I think limiting it to the  mountain edges would be enough to blend things in. Also, the process is quicker each time I do it, now that I know what I'm doing more or less.

www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_01.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_02.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_03.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_04.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_05.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_06.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_07.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_09.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_11.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_14.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_15.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_16.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_17.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_18.png
www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Te...ens/MistyAlps_19.png

monks

----------


## monks

Been doing a lot of the mountain ranges recently. Here's a render of Harad Hills in the far southern deserts. These are lowish peaks around 6k feet high.

http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/re...HaradHills.png

monks

----------


## monks

A quick update on where we're up to. All of the mountains are completed. The terrain still needs a few fixes but the difficult stuff has been done. Here's some shots with hills and lowlands too. In a few weeks we'll be able to drop this into Outerra and post some pics!  :Smile: 



http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...owlands_03.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...owlands_01.png
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...owlands_02.png
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...owlands_04.png

monks

----------


## Lukc

Wowza, this is getting quite big! So, you now basically have a full sized virtual world DEM? Interesting!

----------


## monks

Hey lukc, yes!, we're pretty close to a version 1.0. The dem is currently at 100m res- in the pics it's at 200m. Best viewed in your favourite engine or renderer. I think we'll 
be making it available for Outerra users- don't know the details of how that will work but Outerra is extremely affordable and the 
flying from high orbit into the Earth is not to be missed!
 A few more fixes and then we'll generate a texture in Robes' GTS. We'll be using that ultimately to procedurally generate maps to texture it with in the renderer.


monks

----------


## monks

I'm in the process of adding in estuaries and the major river valleys that define the geography. When adding the hills and lowlands there is a tendency for the geographic features to get swamped. This helps divide the land up along the major rivers. This is a test of a method of creating lowlands and potentially hills too. We also have the option of adding in hills via GTS procedural texturing. The dem will end being a combination of the two approaches.
 I've also sourced dems for the deserts of Africa. They will replace the stuff currently south of the River Harnen (south of Mordor).




Full size: 
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...01012/Tex1.png



Full size:
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...1012/Tex10.png



Full Size:
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...1012/Tex12.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...1012/Tex15.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...Tex1_small.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...01012/Tex4.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...01012/Tex9.png


monks

----------


## kenny3

Woah!!!!!!!! 
*applause*

----------


## monks

Thanks Kenny! 

Quick update. A wip of the desert area of Harad (south of Mordor). It uses dems from the Sahara. I was happy to use it
because there is no software that easily create convincing procedural sand deserts.



full size: http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De.../Desert_01.png







More here:
Dev - Real Mountains

monks

----------


## monks

At the moment we're preparing for a version 1.0 release. Maybe that should be 1.5 but who's counting?
 If I travel in a straight line it'll be weeks not months.
 Things to do:
 * Improve the coastlines. The previous version had much better coastlines. Here's a shot of the new stuff. You
 can see that there are many more crinkles and outlets into the sea. The trick is to not affect is so much that
 it changers the map at the edges too much. I'm not sure about the underwater channels. I've not given that much
 thought to bathymetry yet, but I did download a 1 km res data set recently.




 * Finish the lowlands and hills. At the moment the coverage is patchy. It's a case of either creating a multiplication mask
 or directly changing the dem itself. Mask preferred.
 * Add small scale noise to the mountains. This tends to create better mountains when you get in really close to them in 
Outerra. At the moment this has been done already via the base dem being noised, but that's not an ideal solution, but it
 would probably achieve the desired result quickly for the mountains. The other option is to use masks and noise the mountains
 separately from the rest of the terrain. That would take a bit longer so may not make it into the release.

 The release will be in Outerra's native format packaged up so it can dropped in easily to the install dir. We'll
 have to arrange some download.  :Smile: 

monks

----------


## monks

Ok, update, the coastlines are in.

 I've settled on which dem I'm going to use now for the lowlands so I'm working to that
 setting up the mountains right. A couple of pics of the Blue Mountains.

Full res:
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...BlueMts_01.jpg
http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/De...BlueMts_02.jpg

Apart from the mountains, I'm going to add some hills in a few places.
 The blue craters are lakes and wetlands.  :Smile:  Not sure what to do with those since Outerra doesn't distinguish
 between multiple levels of water at the moment. I'll probably leave them in as is this time.
 There's a few finessey things I could do I suppose, but it's never ending...

 Then I can build it and run it through our make system which produces a procedural texture via GTS software.
 That will probably take a few days in itself, but that's down from 10 days!, it seems to now...almost fly :p.

 The terrain here is covering half the area it should (4000 km ^2) so there's x2 vertical exaggeration.

monks

----------


## monks

I've tinkered with this for long enough for the time being. Time to pack it off to make!


More images here:
Development

monks

----------


## Lukc

Beautiful stuff there! Makes me want to load it into a flight simulator!

----------


## monks

Lukc, we'll be making it available for download for the Outerra community. It'll be dead easy to install too. For this release we'll be using Outerra's default texturing scheme. But next release should see full user defined textures that you can see in the pics.

 Liked your recent map btw...was going to leave a comment but the thread was locked... :Wink: 

Outerra:
Outerra

monks

----------


## monks

We've got a working tile set now from world Machine after a few improvements and issues. We're now running it through make.
 We've hit a snag currently but I think we've ironed it out. Run time is probably about 3 days. With testing and stuff, ETA
is 1 to 2 weeks. The plan is to let people download it in Outerra. I think we're going to give the Outerra folks the prime cuts
as it were. We can release sections of the terrain to other users np. Just thinking aloud- we've not discussed it yet. 

monks

----------


## Korash

I REALLY have to find a way to justify picking up Outerra to the wife....I would love to be able to dive right into this 'cause the snippets you have posted are GORGEOUS!!!!

Looking forward to seeing what I can.

----------


## Redrobes

I may be wrong cos I was on the alpha/beta test guys but I thought that the basic outerra demo was a free one. Maybe I am wrong tho...

Outerra Anteworld Alpha Demo

----------


## monks

Yes Outerra!! Thanks Korash. did we mention OUTERRA? OUTERRA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-D

monks

----------


## Lyandra

This project is amazing!  :Very Happy:

----------


## monks

Thanks Lyandra!!! You're pretty awesome too. You can fly around it in Outerra when we release :-D

monks

----------


## Korash

GRRRRR!!

down loaded the demo but all I get is the window with the black screen.....a quick look through the graphic card problems and it looks like I am out of luck...not sure which prog I have that is bugging up though...WHHHhaaaaaaaa

----------


## Redrobes

Grab an account on their forum and ask for help stating the card you have and the driver version number installed. They know a lot more about what cards and what versions are required. They get back pretty quickly.

----------


## monks

Hmmm...a 4 series ATI by any chance? Really hope you get it fixed.

monks.

----------


## cameni

> down loaded the demo but all I get is the window with the black screen.....a quick look through the graphic card problems and it looks like I am out of luck...not sure which prog I have that is bugging up though...WHHHhaaaaaaaa


Find "Loaded modules: " in the eng.log, first three are usually Outerra modules, followed by other, injected ones. They are listed with full paths so one can usually find out which program it is.

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## Korash

Well, I managed to find that eng file, and it looks like I might be falling into that AMD problem...with a 6900 Radeon. I have attached the file here if anyone can make sense of the gobblygook (at least it is to me with all my ludditisms...), RR, I will be posting the same over there as soon as I make that account. Thanks for the idea.

@monks...As do I. As do I

engNote.txt

----------


## cameni

Oh, this is an issue with newer AMD drivers, a bug that causes shader compilation fail. Please download the development version instead, it contains a workaround for it.

----------


## Korash

Thanks cameni  :Very Happy: 

have some rep for the work on Outerra, Great stuff there, and the help offered. I will do that and let you know how iy goes.

----------


## Lyandra

> You can fly around it in Outerra when we release :-D


I would love to do that but I doubt my computer can handle Outerra...  :Frown:  Hopefully one day...  :Wink: 

I will say it again. This project is awesome! Keep it up guys!  :Very Happy:

----------


## monks

:Smile: ))))...that's a real shame Lyandra...  :Frown:  my computer won't run it either at the moment haha..well, in truth I just had to reinstall EVERYTHING on my 
system so as of an hour ago it does run it again. So...release has been put back a couple of weeks...or until I can be sure I've solved my hardware problem which keeps freezing the computer. Fingers crossed I've fixed it!  :Wink: 
For Outerra, I think the mian thing is the gfx card. Minimum recommended is an 8800 GTX or ATI 4850 I think, -with 512 MB memory. And also a 2 core cpu.

monks

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## Korash

I would suggest a new ATI card ...my 6900 (with 2 gigs memory on board) is buggy in that it will not run it longer than 5 min without crashing. Or maybe go the Nvidia route instead......

I am waiting for the new drivers in the hope that it works with that....

----------


## monks

Hope y'all having a jolly festive season!

 PC issues ironed out. Santa's elves have been busy down the me-dem mines haha...some screens from the latest build. We're doing some tests in make to get the textures right in GTS. Once we've done that, we'll put out the release build. The release build is already waiting at the beginning of the pipeline and has some improvements/adjustments. 
 There's a lot of fog in the pics but it serves to give some visual cues to the landforms. Outerra's biomes are slated to come online in the next 6 months, so we'll have a scripting interface with which to change the textures, veg and snow placement. You may have noticed that the forests on the map are missing. The Outerra devs have kindly offered to put a quick hack in to get those in for release. Woohoo!  :Smile: 

  

  



Cheers,
monks

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## Korash

:drool:

can't wait  :Very Happy:

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## AntonioFrade

I just found this post, but it looks definitely cool!

----------


## Korash

And now that I seem to have outerra working on my mashine, I am having dreams about flying into Mordor...  :Very Happy:  not sure if I would call that cool or terrifying  :Wink:  oooo the anticipation!!!!!!

----------


## mearrin69

Flying well above it, perhaps while clutched by a giant eagle, might be okay...if you had the proper breathing equipment.
M

----------


## monks

Thanks Antonio! :-D...glad you got it fixed Korash...woohoo! Yeh...I'd love to import a dragon or eagle animated model into Outerra and set the cam position so you could fly one. At the moment Mordor is not very Mordorish- but once the biomes come online things will really take a leap forward I think. Still, tweak the fog settings and sun position for a reddish glow and you have a pretty wicked flying experience!

I think I've finally ironed out my pc problems...Geez...don't want to jinx myself though by saying that :p...There's a quick hack by Cameni here to get some forest placement from a user-defined map.
 I'm rebuilding some river valleys that got destroyed from our recent remapping of lowland heights and then running another make which will spit out the textures and the final release build. The GTS texture output maps will be used in Outerra's upcoming biomes system to place different biome types. If all goes well it'll be about 2 weeks until we can release something.
 The release will include the forests and we'll be adding in the major lakes too.  :Wink:  Mt Doom is a little higher now- around 16,000 ft from the plain...scary...and Erebor is in too- couldn't leave that out after seeing The Hobbit nu nu.

  

  

  

Looking south-west over the forests of Northern Ithilien to Minas Tirith and Mount Mindolluin.

  

monks

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## Rave-TZ

What would it take to get topographical data from Global Mapper of Middle Earth?  I just got a $10k laser cutter and would love to make a topo map of it much like this.






> Thanks Antonio! :-D...glad you got it fixed Korash...woohoo! Yeh...I'd love to import a dragon or eagle animated model into Outerra and set the cam position so you could fly one. At the moment Mordor is not very Mordorish- but once the biomes come online things will really take a leap forward I think. Still, tweak the fog settings and sun position for a reddish glow and you have a pretty wicked flying experience!
> 
> I think I've finally ironed out my pc problems...Geez...don't want to jinx myself though by saying that :p...There's a quick hack by Cameni here to get some forest placement from a user-defined map.
>  I'm rebuilding some river valleys that got destroyed from our recent remapping of lowland heights and then running another make which will spit out the textures and the final release build. The GTS texture output maps will be used in Outerra's upcoming biomes system to place different biome types. If all goes well it'll be about 2 weeks until we can release something.
>  The release will include the forests and we'll be adding in the major lakes too.  Mt Doom is a little higher now- around 16,000 ft from the plain...scary...and Erebor is in too- couldn't leave that out after seeing The Hobbit nu nu.
> 
>   
> 
>   
> ...

----------


## monks

//copy of post in other thread//

Hey Rave, very cool stuff you've posted there and what an exciting industry to work in! Yes, we can output directly from Global Mapper I think...STL? or something. Maybe that's easier all round. I'd have to reimport the release build (imminent) back into Global Mapper. Not straightforward but with a bit of effort it can be done- I'd have to do it anyway eventually so...
 Yes, The Me-dem heightmap has moved on quite a bit since that pic Robes posted. 8 levels might be a bit limited for the whole map I reckon but best thing would be to try a mock up in a 3D app I guess. Yeh, it might look pretty cool. If it doesn't we could always give you a smaller area.
 I always loved those kind of realisations of maps..I remember our geography teacher had a kind of latex physical relief map on the classroom wall, and it was always fascinating to look at.

monks

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## monks

Hey, we're going to release the demo very soon...! The build is done and good to roll. In the meantime here's a few pics from both the GTS texturer and from Outerra. Once Outerra's biomes come online GTS will be providing the distribution maps. 

 This is a demo. We'll release an update in the next weeks which will be V 1.0, and good for building architecture on. We just need to make a few changes to heights in a few places: Anduin Valley and Mirkwood, Gondor, Rohan.
 New stuff this time: Lonely Mt added. Lakes now visible as water in Outerra.Numerous other fixes and improvements.

 At the moment lakes are set at sea level. Further down the line when Outerra supports lakes at different heights we'll release another version which will have lakes set correctly. This wil change terrain heights around the immediate vacinity of them but won't impact other than that.

 Currently there is no Rivendell- I mean there is no deep valley especially created for it. Ideally we'd want to use the Lauterbrunnen terrain for that (It was explicitly based on the Swiss valley). That would have to be part of a patch for future release. Apologies to any extreme elf lovers :-D Such things happen when you're trying to build an entire world...!


GTS Texture in ViewingDale Viewer
  

More here: ViewingDale

GTS Texture as a drape in World Machine
  


Outerra
   

More here: Outerra Beta



monks

----------


## Vellum

Very impressive Monks, I've been enjoying following along on this!!  Looking forward to your release, congratulations  :Very Happy:  Have a bit of rep!

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## monks

Thanks Vellum! The goood news is, it's going to be FREE. All you need to do is download and install it and have at least an nvid 8600 to 8800 gfx card. Then you'll be able to fly around the whole thing. More instructions to follow with the release!  :Smile: 

monks

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## Vellum

Free is always good  :Wink:   Thanks for the mini update, I'll be waitin and watchin

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## Korash

This is going to be a stand alone thingy...!!???!! For FREE??????  :Surprised:  :cool:

I though with all the work you guys were doing on it, I thought that it would have some sort of pricetag on it. I KNOW this is a labour of love, but even so....

----------


## Redrobes

Yes the MeDem project has always been free and non commercial. It is a labour of love (and pain !). Outerra exists in two forms - a demo and a paid up thingy. I dont know much about the paid up direction they are going in but its some kind of world exploration tool or a game engine or something. But for the free download at the mo there is only an earth option. In fact until recently there were no options, you got earth. Soon there will be MeDem listed on the list of worlds to explore and the data is hosted and automatically downloaded from them as you explore it.

It does look very cool now. I got mine going yesterday and had a wander. There is much to do but at least we have outerra support now for tree placement so we have Mirkwood, Fangorn, Lorien etc in there now. We dont have full biome control so the snow in some places looks great in other places there should be some but there is not. As time goes on we can provide all the masks for them to place it better or we can adjust our landscape heights to match up with that which outerra considers snowy. Monks has provided some images above where we draped the GTS texture over World Machine which shows the land types better since we use the programmable texture shader to generate that in non real time. Outerra tho is real time and so much more fun at the expense of some loss of ability to control that biome in its current state.

----------


## monks

:-D The standalone viewer is free yes! If you want to add models or make other changes to the landscape then you'll need to buy Anteworld, which is very affordable as you know  :Wink: 

//just saw Robes' post-...he explains it more...!

monks

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## aquarits

Sorry disturb everybody, but i just have 2 question s about all this:

1- How many ppl work in this project? (It looks a HUGE project, saw monk since 2008 working in this)
2- I only can see this place in this forum and the project site, or it will be available  in something like google earth?



> :-D The standalone viewer is free yes! If you want to add models or make other changes to the landscape then you'll need to buy Anteworld, which is very affordable as you know 
> 
> //just saw Robes' post-...he explains it more...!
> 
> monks


Is it a viewer to the world?

Congratulations for all work!

----------


## monks

Hi aquarits, thanks..heh...yes we've been working on this for some time.  :Smile:  We've had input and help from a number of people along the way (like SeerBlue. another member on here), but at present, the main contributors are Robes and myself. We have another member SkyStrider who provides an online topo map using the data. And I guess I should include our web master who hosts the website and provides us with ftp space, Oshyan Greeene (of Planetside software). Of course we'd have to include the developers at Outerra too: Cameni and Angrypig for their help which is not insubstantial. That's it really! We're now moving into the next phase where we're looking for 3D modellers/texture artists to help populate the enviroment.
 Yes, you get to download and install a viewer to view the world for FREE. All you need is the minimum spec hardware- something around an 8800 nvidia or better- and you can fly around it to your heart's content. Google-Earth is the closest thing to describing the Outerra Engine actually, but this is a game oriented engine so it has ocean waves, rustling trees, howling wolves...yes you get the picture! If you want to actually add stuff to the world...like buildings, roads, textures, etc, then you will need to buy Anteworld, which is the commercial world building game using the "Outerra" engine. Anteworld is very affordable too. The Earth data which is in Anteworld is pretty incredible of itself. Worth every penny just to see that frankly.

monks

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## aquarits

Nice, what is the name of the Viewer? Want to see everything. I read all the Thread today before subscribe to follow hehe, maybe i miss some information.

*counted 8 member team"*  :Very Happy:

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## monks

:-D...kewl...the viewer is called...uhmm...well not sure really but it's the Outerra engine bundled with the ME-DEM data. Call it the "Middle-Earth for Outerra demo". We'll be posting links and instructions obviously! 

monks

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## Redrobes

I was under the impression it would be the Anteworld demo which is a demo based on the Outerra engine. So go to Outerra to see all about that and the forum there. You can download a demo of the earth now but if your looking for medem data then hold for a few more days max. Its imminent now. I am not sure if there is going to be a new released version or a patch to the current one for the medem option so to save downloading and installing something twice I would wait the day or so.

I think I am correct in saying that Monks has done all of the terrain. I don't believe there has been anyone else actually sculpting it. Thats done in Global Mapper and then it goes to World Machine and Wilbur in some arcane process and voodoo that Monks does to get it into a set of terrain tiles and some additional properties masks thats then fed into the build system for the project. I write the build system and about half a dozen tools thats part of it with the help of image magick, Perl and GnuMake to grind it through about 20 stages of processing to export a set of height tiles that is compatible with Outerra input. It also generates a set of properties masks again. We use all those to generate the ViewingDale texture and tile set, the topo map tiles, the outerra tiles and a special vegetation mask for Outerra. The donation of large FTP space has been immensely helpful and all of the additional comments and input from the forum has been great not to mention the original reference maps and at the root of it all Tolkiens work. So we are here by standing on the shoulders of giants it is true.

Outerra is a team of a few chaps (4 ?) in Slovakia who can then take these compatible tiles and convert them into Outerras own custom format which is then uploaded to googles cloud servers. The data is then downloaded and streamed dynamically through Outerra engine to show what needs to be seen at any time.

In the coming months and years I think we would be looking for models of Minas Tirith, Isengard and all of the notable cities and buildings to be modelled in 3D. Some people already have such models so we would like to persuade them to join in and set them into this real time landscape. Not sure yet about the technical implications of that since I know some of these models of Minas Tirith are vast ! I think more people would be involved with the project from the 3D building point of view tho as this land form terrain stuff is very specialized stuff requireing significant computing capability, tools etc and I believe hard to implement and keep consistent as a team exercise. If people could each model little bits of Bree, Rivendell or Osgiliath then it would definitely help.

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## Redrobes

It is done ! We have released the first version of the MeDem data with an Outerra Viewer ! So if you've ever dreamed of flying around Middle-Earth, of sitting by the cool lapping shores of Lindon, of strolling through the singing forests of Lorien, or racing over the cruel spires of Mordor ... now's your chance!
Just download and install it.

You can get the downloads from several places. You will need the Outerra (Anteworld) tech demo and a copy of the MeDem data. For the instructions on where to get them I would recommend going over to the outerra forums post:
Middle-Earth World for Outerra released!
Which has the locations of several download mirrors to handle the 900Mb+ download. You will need a reasonably good graphics card of the NVidia 8600 / 8800 type or better or a latest AMD card. The AMD cards have had some issues but I think on the whole most of them have been ironed out now. Check with the Outerra site for compatibility.

At the moment we're using the vanilla Outerra Earth environment and textures. Hence the snow in Mordor. Outerra Biomes are currently in development. That will introduce a complete array of ecosystems for the planet, both textures and vegetation.

We're looking for 3D modellers and environment artists. This is a demo. In the coming weeks we'll be releasing a Builders Version of the terrain, which will be an updated terrain model ready for modding.

Included in the Anteworld demo is an entire world based on the Earth. Think Google Earth but with game oriented graphics and engine! Anteworld enables you to change the world environment. Also you can add buildings, roads, vehicles, change models and textures too!

We have made a small video of it here:
Middle-Earth DEM Project in Outerra - YouTube




Cheers, Monks and Robes.

----------


## Vellum

Good job guys!! You've done an outstanding job with this, I wish you more success in working with this. I think many times when we (anyone) looks at this they fail to forget the amount of work / time and passion that it takes to do something of this scope, I for one stand in awe!!  You guys deserve a round of applause  :Wink:   Well rep added to redrobes, I gotta spread the love around a bit before I can add some more rep to you Monks, but even thou I can't "officially" add it you got it  :Razz:

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## monks

That's very gracious of you Vellum, thanks! Speaking for myself, it's a personal thing this milestone. Closure is important. No point in it sitting on a hard drive now is it? :-D It has been a lot of work yes, the project has been therapeutic in many ways. In some ways it's an ending, in others a beginning. Of course, the project moves forward too. We still need to release the builder's version. That's the next immediate step.
 Nah, no applause, just enjoy it for what it is.  :Smile: 

monks

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## Redrobes

Thanks Vellum ! Like Monks said really - its like reaching a plateau and then taking a breath before staring at the next precipice. You gotta look around and stare back at the view from time to time but this is not the summit. Even where we are I would not have predicted that we would get to. But with the addition of outerra it was like being given a boost so that we just had to get this integrated. From my point of view I merely write the glue that connects Monk's work to Outerras work both left and right of me look pretty amazing and I would have not said that either were possible with a few guys and home PCs but they have. There are some 3D models of Minas Tirith which are so good you would also say its not possible until you see them so I hope to persuade them to come to the party.

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## Midgardsormr

Do you have a plan for curating models as they are added to the world? Are there any markers or anything of the sort in place to indicate where various places are supposed to go? I might be willing to contribute a few models here and there. Nothing on the scale of one of the major cities, but I could probably do something like Weathertop or Tom Bombadil's house or the tower at Cirith Ungol.

----------


## Redrobes

We haven't talked much about it as we have been busy on this terrain thing first but the way I see it happening is that somewhere on some web site - either medem or Outerra we would have a set of models that we could import into the world. I would guess that we could have multiple models of any type and people would be able to choose which one they like. I suspect that one model will dominate and become a de facto standard for that place and people would add more detail to it.

We do know that Outerra supports some variant of the Collada format so that means that sketchup models are in. I also know that those guys use Blender so I would imagine that its at least a compatible collada format with blenders export. SKU sketchup files are also zipped collada so that doesnt seem to be a problem. Now I don't know about colour, textures and object grouping parameters and how much of that is supported or whether there are any restrictions on it. As you can tell I haven't personally tried to import any kind of model into the app yet tho.

In terms of which models I think for the bigger stuff it is probably a good idea not to try any of them at this point because we know some of them have been covered by other people and we may be able to persuade some of these people to move their model into the world themselves. I would foresee that Minas Tirith, and one or two of the towers would have been done by somebody somewhere already. We just have to find them.

Personally I think it would be fun to model Bree since its a collections of early medieval houses so we can model them one at a time and not have to get too hung up on their exact shape and layouts too early. Weathertop would sound fun and a very useful addition to the site especially as we could them model the terrain around it and immediately under it to make it fit.

The Tower at Cirith Ungol is also a very useful place to have done. We had reserved a gap in the mountains of Ephel Duath tho I know its been adjusted about a bit since then. I need to check its still there but I am sure that Monks considered it in that area.

So yes please whatever you can manage. Those places that are known but not especially central to the books are particularly welcome since I'm guessing they are not likely to be in existence by anybody in any form yet.

But its true that we could do with making up a list and working out what we can already get hold of and what we probably want to see in the far flung future and also prioritize it so that at least the central places from the stories are at least marked up on the map. Outerra already has some kind of teleport to listed locations and we have to generate that list.

----------


## Korash

AAAAARGGGG!!!!!!!

It Finally is available and what does Nortons do with the data set once I get it downloaded.....POPS UP A RED FLAG!!!!!!!!! "this file is New (less than a week old), This file has few users (less than 5) and comes from an unknown site." and promptly dumps the file into quarantine and DOES NOT ALLOW ME TO RESTORE IT!!!!!!!!!!!! 

The Computer Gods HATE me. Time to eat some worms....  :Wink:  One of these days I will be able to use it.......'til then I can but dream....

On the bright d=side, It IS out so all I can say is CONGRATS to Monks and Redrobes, and may it grow beyond your wildest dreams  :Very Happy:  and Reps AWAY...if I can yet

----------


## monks

Korash, when we release the next versi0on (weeks) can you kick Norton to the kerb, and install it? I don't know much about this, but could renaming the download file, and then deactivating Norton help? If it might help we can always try set up another file for you on say GoogleDrive.

monks

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## monks

Midgardsormr, Robes basically said it. And to see Weathertop..or any of those places would be really cool. I can easily drop a Wethertop in there in the next build. Yes, I did create a valley for Cirith Ungol, but not much more thasn that. 

monks

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## Korash

> Korash, when we release the next versi0on (weeks) can you kick Norton to the kerb, and install it? I don't know much about this, but could renaming the download file, and then deactivating Norton help? If it might help we can always try set up another file for you on say GoogleDrive.
> 
> monks


I did some looking (amid many a sob  :Wink:  ) at what the Nortons Reputau=ion scan thiny does, and it seems that when ever you down load something, it does a check against the "Norton Community" to see how many people have downloaded it, how new it is, what kind of comments they have on file and the source site. Seeing as this is BRAND NEW (yeeesh) Nortons has never heard of it (DUUUH!!) so as far as Reputaion is concerned it is BAAAAAD!!. Usually when it doesn't like something it just puts it in Quaranteen where it USUALLY gives you the option to restore it and tell the prog that "this file is okay". Being SO  new, it must be REALLY bad because it didn't give those options, just dump it or report it....

Now is that stupid or what???!!

They do however have a whay that Sotftware Providers can "speed up the White Listing process", but I think there might be some sort of charge. Not sure why I think that, but I just do. 

I also found out that all this ****e happens as long as I have repscan on (it runs with all scans and in the background) it will just dump the files until it likes the Rep status. I knew about the Repscan, but not how aggressive it could get. I like its intent, but not  when it goes THIS far.....

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## mearrin69

Hi guys. I've looked in on this before but just caught myself up on all of your work. Very nice stuff! Congratulations on getting it released and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

I've got some 3D modeling/texturing skills and would be very interested in participating to some degree when you're ready for buildings or other constructed features. I'd leave the really big stuff to the pros or the folks who have already built the models (like that amazing Minas Tirith project) but I'd like to contribute something if I can. Will try to follow this thread to see when you post a list of needed items and technical specs.
M

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## monks

Korash, would another renamed demo help? I can speak to Cameni to see if that might work for you. You'd have to turn off repscan though in the meantime until you'd installed it. I'd be able to put it on my googledrive. That's why I don't run antivirus here- probably equally stupid but it's never been disastrous yet -touch wood.

 That sounds great mearrin69...we'll keep you all posted! I've drawn up a quick list of sites that need modelling. The obvious ones from the books. There's also lots of other useful things that could be modelled too- such as "generic" buildings such as dwellings, towers, forts, roads/tracks, sign posts, milestones, etc.

monks

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## Korash

Thanks monks, but first I think I will try again later with the repscan off, and see where that goes. If that works I will be contacting Nortons to give them an earfull about how stipid this situation is.....and I will keep you guys posted.

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## Redrobes

I run a savage firewall but I also don't run antivirus. They seem to hand control of your machine over to some 3rd party censor list which you have to trust as much as the files your downloading. They also seem to hose your performance esp when saving and loading from the HDD. I am pretty careful about what I download too and I monitor the processes that are running on my PC fairly well. Its possible that there's stuff running taking barely any CPU and being very well hidden but I am somewhat confident that at the mo there is not.

An antivirus which says that if it doesn't know about something is automatically suspicious is just plain bonkers. For me as a coder I could not write anything under that kind of restriction. I want an antivirus that at most will only flag stuff it knows to be bad. This is just like airport security and the clogging of the people flow through their barriers and has about as much impact on real security too noting the Brinks diamond heist this week which bypassed all security there and had people access a plane baggage hold. Its no difference with files on the drive in this case.

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## mearrin69

> I've drawn up a quick list of sites that need modelling. The obvious ones from the books. There's also lots of other useful things that could be modelled too- such as "generic" buildings such as dwellings, towers, forts, roads/tracks, sign posts, milestones, etc.


Sorry if I've missed it: Is there a site devoted to this project or is this thread it? Where would you likely post your list of things you want modeled, tech specs, etc.? Where would you want finished models posted?

I get that you guys aren't 100% ready to answer all of these questions yet but figured I'd bring some of them up. I might do some digging for refs when I have some free time and have a go at modeling some basic stuff. I presume this is late Third Age M.E. as of the start of the LotR trilogy...Shire still intact, Barad Dur still standing, etc.?
M

----------


## Redrobes

Monks drew up a nice list of places that we need to model.... and then kept it hidden on his PC !!!! LOL

No - the news is that were right now putting a new forum together. The MeDem site has traditionally existed as me-dem.org but we spun off a new site me-dem.me.uk because we didnt have any proper admin rights to the other one and we now host the main galleries on that but up to now we didnt have a proper forum on the new site - it linked to the old forum.

The thing is that the old forum has had a lot of issues and basically its almost impossible to register for it. It has the medem news of 2005 on the front page of it still.... So Cameni has proposed that he will make a new forum as a spin off of outerra and have all the worlds on there that people can model and populate for outerra - our MeDem being the only one at the mo other than earth. Not sure if he is proposing to have earth on this new site or leave that for the main outerra forum.

Anyways. were just dotting some T's and crossing some I's and setting it up so we can have a place where people can actually register and get a log in and we can host a list and start to work on some models in a more coordinated way than were currently doing.

So maybe tomorrow or day after we will post a new URL so that we can get ourselves organized and have lots of threads for each place / model instead of cluttering up this forum or the outerra main forum. Tho I am sure we would post milestones, some pics and news to both here and the main outerra forum too. Heck - maybe we would even post some real news to the old medem forum and break a habit of a lifetime  :Wink:

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## mearrin69

I've been ogling Fonstad's book forever. Maybe it's time to get it.  :Smile:  Looking forward to your site.
M

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## Korash

WOOOOT!!!  :Very Happy: 

It actually worked  :Very Happy:  I had to turn off the antivirus for it to hang around long enough to install, but it is now DONE  :Very Happy:  Psyched and as happy as Bilbo in his own comfy bed.  :Very Happy:

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## Redrobes

Cool ! Let us know what you think and what bits of it could be improved. We had to do some crazy stuff with the terrain height around lakes to turn them into mini seas because at this point Outerra doesnt support lakes so the lake borders are a bit blocky. And biomes will come into play at some point so we can do some more there too. There is no Rivendell or some other fairly important features but the basic land form is there and running so its a start.

That new forum seems to be live and working now so I can direct you to:

Outerra Worlds Forums - Index

and you can start some posts in there about the locations you might like to make into 3D. Monks will put in that list at some point. Im not sure at this point what capability we have for importing the models yet but if they are compatible with blender / sketchup then I think they should be ok for the future.

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## monks

I'm not getting updates on this thread so apologies for not seeing this  :Smile: 

*NEW FORUMS*
Outerra Worlds Forums - Index

Off the top of my head:- 

roads! Great East road. Great north rd. 
Isengard- think we can buy that cheap. 
Weathertop ruins. 
Argonath 
Bree 
Doors of Moria. Although that would need a lake. 
Rivendell- needs a valley 
Hobbiton, or a hobbit hole 
Green Dragon at Bywater 
Woody End 
Last Bridge- that needs a river. 
Tom Bombadil's House 
barrow downs - ie, tumuli 
Edoras 
Helm's Deep 
Minas Tirith 
minas Ithil 
Erech Stone 
Moria...haha,..yeh right... 
Durin's Stair 
Caras Galedhon in Lorien 
Wellinghall Treebeard's home. 
Dol Guldur (dependent on time setting) 
Pelennor 
Osgiliath 
Minas Morgul 
amon hen, amon lhaw- near Rauros where Frodo flees Boromir 
Morannon Gate 
Barad Dur 
The Carrock where Beorn lives 
Lake Town- needs lake 
Dale 
Carn Dum 
Thranduil's realm in Mirkwood. 
Annuminas ruins 
site of the Troll camp in the Hobbit. 

...so not many then :_D


Woohoo Korash!

 Way to go mearrin. Fonstad is a really good source. I'll list a few refs for people..but folks can add to them.
Time setting is not sooo important if people want to see a place then why not?, but yes T.A. annuminas ruins tell you T.A , but if someone wanted to model the old city, then go ahead.

monks

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## monks

Just started a 10 week course in 3DS Max and picked up a copy. Wow,...monster program. So, the long learning process of modelling with meshes starts here!  :Smile: 

monks

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## jezelf

Hello 

Had a look at the project on Outerra yesterday - amazing job folks! - I've been following your project on and off with excited anticipation, stumbled on the Outerra and I saw your contribution - great job!!! - it does look magnifcent so far, if you've got more to add with routes and buildings and such,  it's going to be spectacular when complete...Im sooooo tempted to make Weathertop ruins for ya, but just don't know if I can commit just yet. 

Out of curiosity - what would the specs be? tri count, # of textures @ what res? - looking at the Outerra files, looks like Diffuse and Normal textures (no specular?) @ 1024 for tiled ground textures. what texel density are you looking at? I assume you need 3 LODs as well. 

I wanted to show your work off today, demo won't load and tells me it's looking for updates. I updated my drivers yesterday so, I'll need to look into it  - anyway, I was instantly wanting to know - how do I get my own map in there? I read the overview in an earlier post, sounded a lot more steps than I expected. I had been making a world in Fractal Terrians, at first I was curious if I could churn out tiles and it just drop in , but I see it's a lot more complex. 

I've used World Machine and Wilbur, so the arty side is still within reach for me, but sounds like theres a load more things to consider. 

Do you have a tutorial or workflow you can show? I'll love to find out. Im guessing at this point it'll be a few years before there's a chance for me to get to see something like a user friendly importer implimented into Outerra? (I'd ask this on their forum, but I'm waiting for my registration to be approved)

anyway - thanks for all your hard work! it's truely very inspiring and I look forward to seeing more....and getting back there and flying about as if Im on - I dunno, -  a giant eagle  ?  :Smile: 

cheers
jez

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## Redrobes

Hi Jez, we basically have a base height map which is 40K x 40K. Thats made from global mapper by Monks and he takes it into a few apps - I am not exactly sure what the secret sauce is but you can ask him. I know world machine and wilbur are part of it tho. We eventually get out a load of height map tiles and thats fed into my GTS. That doesnt change the height map values at the mo but it does generate a load of texture stuff for us. Now Outerra doesnt use a texture map - only a vegetation bias map so we generate that for them. For the viewingdale map we generate loads of textures and make up the full colour one in 2D. But for outerra the guys over there have allowed us to use some tool which converts height maps and the vegetation map into the final outerra format. That thing uses the graphics card with loads of processing and my card isnt powerful enough to run it (its missing some required extension or something). So monks does that bit as well.

Outerra doesnt do specular and diffuse as such but it generates all of the terrain procedurally from the base tile packed info so its shaders are built in to the app. I see some guys on the forums modding the shader textures so they must be configurable somehow but we dont do that. I think the free demo app doesnt have model import and shader adjustment stuff. At the mo outerra isnt supporting configurable biomes so your stuck with temperate plains / woodland until we get that then I think we will need extra textures to program the biome across the terrain. Since me-dem have had that info for a long while were just waiting for them and it will look great when they get that bit coded up.

Your probably going to need Cameni's help getting a map into outerra but he is a very helpful chap so you need to ask Cameni if the Outerra Mapressor is available to use by anyone and monks about how we run it in me-dem from a tile set. What I can tell you that you would need is lots of tiles of terrain height maps in HF2 or HFZ format but I am not sure how the mapressor knows how many to use and the layout for them.

And yes your right we use 1024 sized tiles and there are no LODs - mapressor does the LOD generation via a fractal / wavelet generator which is how its so good when its zoomed right up close. I dont think each individual stage is all that complicated but the management of them all is a burden with so many tiles. That management is what I do with the makefiles. It used to take 10 days to run the makefile from the point where monks has generated the height maps. Were down to 3 days now with the faster CPUs tho. But don't think by any stretch that you can do it manually one at a time. You will need to write a batch processing script of some sort. 40K is 40 tiles square so thats 1600 tiles to process. I think mapressor uses 5K tiles tho as input.

And yes - importing a giant eagle would make a nice change from the ole Cesna or Apache ! Very nice idea !!!

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## monks

Hi Jez, if you're using FT then you'll pretty much have everything regards terrain that you need. I have a copy of the latest version as well, but not used if for a wee while. We use real satellite data so that adds some more steps to the process of modelling the terrain. We use Global Mapper to store all of our data and it assists muchisimo with using real terrain. Outerra will be using vector import at some point in the future, so having your enviroment/ game maps stored in vector format will be helpful- but at the mo, it's image maps.
 I see World Machine 2.3 supports the preservation of gereffing data in the bt format.That's a good trend but not that helpful to us as we use hfz because it's a much smaller compressed format (plus supports gereffing info). I tend to use Wilbur for certain global processes so I need to be able to get the entire map into Wilbur. Hfz helps do that.
 Basically all you need to do, like Robes said, is speak to Cameni. There's another chap over on Outerra who's also interested in getting his own terrain in there. Biomes are being developed at the moment. I imagine they'll be with us within 6 months. There have been some pretty cool enhancements to the enviroment recently- better textures, different colours in the trees, large boulders with overhangs, and tweaked the fractal for outcrops.

 I''m talking purely about the terrain (not texturing). I should say though that you might be disappointed with the results of using procedural terrain in Outerra. The sheer scale of draw distance is great but it also allows people to see the terrain warts and all...as geography (rather than a restricted film set, render,/ game level, etc). You will inevitably compare your world to the Earth data. The first time we got our terrain into Outerra Robes, Cameni and myself thought the procedural stuff was disappointing. So I demoed a new process I'd wanted to try for a while, using real world data to create Mordor. The results were pretty spectacular compared to the old stuff, so we decided to do the rest that way too. I suppose it depends on what you want. If you want Earth-like land forms, then you need the macro forms of the mountain chains. FT will do a pretty good job of the rivers (only Robes, Joe Slayton and Johannes of GeoControl have tackled that problem), so that will help but it doesn't do convincing mountain chains. If you don't, then FT terrain out the box will be fine.
 I think there may be an iterative process you could apply to try simulate them using Wilbur (and no doubt FT could do it). Basically the idea is to run the erosion processes. Then mask out the rivers, and run noise and incise flows again on mountain areas. Mask rivers, add noise and repeat. That way you might get tree-like river/valley networks growing. You might need to add some height at each step though as erosion would wear down the terrain to nothing. Scripting would be great, but unfortunately we don't have that. Maybe you could put in a feature request? :-D I use Wilbur to create coastlines- crinkle up the terrain at the edges. A bit of noise and a few iterations of incise flows creates some pretty cool fractal erosion. I'm thinking that maybe that might do it.
 Or you could use satellite data. I think there was a small tut or something on WM recently about how to use it. But it's pretty straight forward really.
 Presuming you would want the realistic macro land forms, this is what I'd do. Create your terrain in two layers. A base, and the top layer. The base gives you a more or less flat surface onto which to add the top layer and it controls the landforms (height) at a geographic level. (In our case it also controls water flow but that might not be important to you). The bottom layer doesn't need to be at full project res- I usually apply global processes to it at 1/4 res. The top layer is the satellite data and any procedurals. I don't use procedural terrain now, just erosion. Layering allows you to just "add" terrain and it's clearer what's happening to the heights. For us only using the add operation helps preserve the correct water flow set up in the base layer or any layers beneath it.
 I've not used FT for a while but what I'd do is maybe try running the erosion to get all the rivers, then mask out the rivers and remove all of the terrain detail between rivers (blur or whatever other tools there are available). Grab the river mask and export to World Machine.. and import your satellite data as patches. For the raminaing spaces you could fill them with procedural noise or you could selectively apply another satellite data layer to fill them in. I might reverse the order of the last two steps, ie add the mountains last.
 I'd also create an estuary map- a river mask which controls the width of rivers along their course. That's another strong visual cue when seeing things in Outerra. There's a couple of tuts on here on how to do it in Photoshop. You might also use that or some variant of it to control erosion. That might help give you wider/deeper rivers towards the coast- something you probably won't have. I'd apply that erosion at the beginning of the tmd to the bottom layer.
 (We created our bottom layer using vectorised contours -that's a very natural way to get those river forms but it's a pita to create it, and you need Photoshop, Global Mapper or WinTopo).
 Basically my tmd network is the two layers are added, and the placement of the fill-in data is controlled by masks.
 At the end sprinkle some erosion in WM to knit together the layers with the sediment carry and the channels. It might take too much height off, so clamp the output.
 ...this was only meant to be a short post so apologies  :Smile: ...I'm sure you have tons of alternative ways of doing the various steps. Hope this helps. Feel free to drop us a line  :Wink: 

 I looked at your site btw. Very cool stuff, I especially liked the terrain and the splat maps using the channels. That's something I should learn how to do.

monks

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## jezelf

Hey monks

Wow, thanks for all that info. I appreciate it, but I'll need to read again to digest it all, got a bit lost along the way there. 

My goal is really for my creative writing than a game environment. I've got info on creating a legit solar system (ill post that link next time it's really cool ), got FT for my planet (though I do want to make sure I have proper tectonic plates etc) 
I'm doing a LOTR epic, yeah, I know, another guy :-) , but all for my own pursuit at this point. 

Anyways it would be cool to have something like what's happening with outerra right now, it would another tool for me, it would inspire descriptive scenes, locations, distances, finding logical locations for settlements etc. 

I'm FT is great but I'm not a big fan of the fractal 'look' , not realistic enough. I would have to put it through Wilbur or WM,  yeah, get those erosions.  Textures I could add more too or such as in go, but just to get where you have would be fine for now.

Oh yeah, the website, yeah that terrain was actually for an art test for the company that makes Need for Speed, it was my first real 'go' with world machine other than tests and experiment muck abouts. The splat map was their method, their own tools used those RGBA channels for blending tiled textures. There is  also an ambient map , another grey scale for lights and darks . For my one, it started out as an ambient occlusion map and I ps blended it with the height map from WM. and worked into it.

 I modeled the scene in maya using sculpting and then went into WM , the render out  diffuse and the high res mesh. The high res mesh then went into zbrush where I added more rock detail, to get a normal map out. and ZBRUSH  has a thing called decimation master which is why you can see theres a higher density mesh closer to the road, where the player would be - which I needed to do as the mesh was destined for in game. I used the colour diffuse render from WM at a high res, and in PS used the colour picker tool to select the different separations , grey scales . 

I was writing a tutorial document on the whole process, it's for maya but can be translated to max, as i used both, but max is what I'm using now. I was doing that anyway. I didn't get to finish it coz at the time I got made redundant and did have the time, moved jobs and countries!  but I could dig it out and send to ya if you're interested. I'll have check it that is making sense, but can't remember how far I got. I was really writing it for myself. As I worked out the pipeline and usually forget what I did if I don't keep doing it, but happy to share the knowledge.

Anyway, didn't mean to write this much either! Thanks for your response I look forward to going through it again.

Cheers!
Jez

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## cameni

> Hello 
> Do you have a tutorial or workflow you can show? I'll love to find out. Im guessing at this point it'll be a few years before there's a chance for me to get to see something like a user friendly importer implimented into Outerra? (I'd ask this on their forum, but I'm waiting for my registration to be approved)


Please let me know your user name at Outerra forums, if you weren't approved immediately, it means that the spam filter (based on StopForumSpam lists) rejected your IP or email. There are like 4,000 such accounts weekly, no chance to filter through them.

As for the import, I started to make it more configurable, but basically if you use the same format as ME-DEM guys here, you can use it to import your own world too. I know Carl wanted to do a tutorial about the process he's using, because without that extra effort you'll be likely dissatisfied with the level of detail - what looks ok in a map viewer usually lacks a lot of necessary details when rendered in real scale.

-Brano (Outerra)

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## jezelf

Hi Cameni

First of all - fantastic project! - I'll actually look to buy a licence sometime soon , completely worth the $15! 

Thanks for your reply here. Yeah I guess my request got dumped. Ok, I'll try again. I did get an immediate email, but it says " your request will be reviewed and approved.When this happens, you will receive another email from this address." - never got the confirmation, but didn say anything yet because Im sure you're busy!

anyway, my user name is same as here 'jezelf'

I was flying around the demo again tonight  :Very Happy: 

Thanks for responding here!


<Edit> - yeah just went back there when I login in still get ...

"
An Error Has Occurred!
Your account is still awaiting admin approval."

can't seem to find anywhere to tell you on your forum?? I went to Help, it talks about the process, but only if everything goes according to plan. there's this bit  

"A Need another activation email? link is also displayed in case the email has somehow been lost. "  but I don't see that on the page of the above message.

I'm probably being dumb and missing something.. :Confused:

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## cameni

Ok, you are approved now. You were listed there as a "suspect", because your email could not have been verified with the antispam database. Hmm, I should check other suspects too ...

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## Korash

hmmm for some reason that last post was caught up in moderation...not sure why... :/

I DO find it ironic thought....

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## ravells

I've just downloaded and tried it out, it's so cool. I can't wait until you have buildings in it too.

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## monks

:-D ...Outerra is looking better and better all the time. The latest textures, tree colouration and rocks are a nice improvement. I think the single biggest improvemtnts will be the biomes. I happen to know that there's other seriously COOL stuff being developed right now as well...but I'd definitely be shot if I said anything. Haha...what a wind up! Glad you liked it Ravells!

 Jezelf, sounds like Outerra is exactly what you're looking for. Heh..another LOTR epic..and why not?! :-D
 If you write the tutorial, link us to it please. What did you use for the rocks in ZBrush? I've heared of people using it for terrain touch-ups, I imagine they're custom brushes...but I could never find anything online.

monks

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## jezelf

Hi

thanks for the approval, cameni!! - I'll be over there soon. 

@ Monks. you mean the tutorial for the terrain on my website?  I dug it out and took a look  

here's a bit of a workflow overview -

Maya > Photoshop > World Machine >  PS > Maya > in game engine.

The same could be done using Max, I've not checked for Max's tools yet. I was using Maya at the time, but I hope to make the tutorial for people who use either.I hope to find some time to go through it and follow my own directions, make sure it makes sense, edit etc, before posting. might be a while yet. 

However, it's worth checking out these video tutorials, pretty similar and great results and superior in some ways tbh - generally the same, 

How to create a terrain for Cryengine and UDK Part 1/8 
How to import a terrain to UDK

the difference in my method withe UDK one here,  is he uses the diffuse WM output as his colour map and then tiled grey scales of 3 materials (Grass, rock, soil) in his spat map + normal maps plugged in, and paints them in  (to decent results). I dont use WM colour map in my final work. I was sampling the diffuse output from WM with the colour range tool in PS to get more accurate material masks and use my tiled detail maps to recreate the color map.

so a quick comparison 
UDK version above : 
1 Normal map terrain output from WM  
1 Colour map terrain output from WM  
1  'splat map' .tga made up of 3 grey scales from the 3 detail maps (grass, rock, soil )  in the RGB channels
3 corresponding Normals of detail maps as separate textures to plug in,
(6 textures)

What I was doing : 
1 Normal map terrain output from ZBrush ( WM result mesh into Zbrush, then added some more details custom for the game end result - you don't have to, could be just WM normal map, but it was a bit of a test at the same time )
1  'splat map' mask .tga made up of the detail areas 'color range picked' from the WM colour map + has an AO and light/dark tone variance map in the Alpha channel 1
3 colour tiled detail maps (grass, rock, soil ) 
3 corresponding Normals  to detail maps
(8 textures)

I guess it depends on budgets.  In the long run, the UDK way locks down that 1 Diffuse map to that terrain. If you plan to reuse rock, grass, soil textures, then it's worth the extra 2 .These could also be colourized in the maya game engine tool plugin I used to add variance and optimize texture usage so the reddish looking soil I have in once place could be a sandy tan elsewhere without requiring another colour map. 

The Alpha map means you can reuse things and change the tone and saturation. The way I was doing it (arguably) gives you more authenticity and creative control imho, but it all depends on the engine. 

I've some other terrain for games links I can dig out showing workflow if you want 'em

yeah the novel thing  is really for me to get something out of my system. Self publish maybe, a hobby , so don't go expecting of a new HBO series! ha ha - in my dreams! it's a 'years in the making' thing - everyone else has one around here, so I'll join in  :Very Happy: 

Another thing I'm looking forward to do with Outerra is find a location and then take screen grab, and then work into that into a matte painting as a great starting point. I found a few locations the other day from the current demo and took some grabs. need to buy the license though before I can confidently move forward. It's just some fun mini project - kinda see it like concept art for a game using Outerra. 


For rocks -  yep - using Z-brush/Mudbox. Make some custom brushes via PS and import. 

basically, model highest LOD , UV map in Max> import into Zbrush and sculpt in detail, drag over some custom brushes for details> you can do the colour map in ZB too if you wanted > export maps, mostly Normals.  Might need to retopologise in max again depending on if you edited the highest LOD a lot. Good to have a rock which is generic and reusable - meaning, it's a closed mesh that can be rotated in any direction to maximize reuse.  Then it can intersect with your ground, and placed many times in an area.

For textures it's worth checking out dDo  - looks like a great time saver. I haven't seen organic textures yet though, but it creates a lot of nice maps needed for textures using the normal m

here's some links on sculpting rocks if you're interested...

Rock modeling techniques [Part 1/5] 
Zbrush Rock sculpting 
Zbrush Sculpting - Rock Plates 
Zbrush Tutorial - How to make alphas from pictures for Zbrush 
Rough Rock tutorial - ZBrush 

If you're using Max, you might also find this handy Rock Generator script useful - pretty cool and fast in doing some generic rocks. You then just need to create a low poly version and bake normals to import into the game. I can dig out more links on all this kind of stuff if you need 'em.

cheers
jez

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## monks

Awesome info JezElf! THANKS  :Wink: 

 I have a copy of Max, Maya, Mudbox. I *might* be able to get a copy of ZBrush...which is actually my favourite out of all of em.
 I've decided to try and model a rock...lol...phew, but I'd like to try and get an obelisk or something into Outerra - see how it looks.
 I've no idea how to get models into Outerra so will have to read up on that. I'm sure it can't be that difficult.

Haha...years in the making, ok ok, well ya never know...best foot forward and all that..
 I'll check your website again and I might take you up on that offer of other workflows but post any screenies you have of the terrains, it's always cool to see those.

 btw, check this out, Cameni sent us this the other day. This is really big news imo. I think this technology will really make it possible to make terrain and games at planetary scales.
HPCG lab

monks

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## jezelf

Hey there!

Zbrush is fun yes - just be careful trying to import a mesh of millions in to Max or Maya doesn't kill it!  :Smile:  - I need to get back to Zbrush, been away from it too long.

Lot of video game related stuff works with zbrush max/maya work flows. Here's some environment Sculpting links that may interest you...

Various Tutorials  Some of which also below.

 Tiling Rock Wall Tutorial  Console, Standard Development

Generic Wall Tutorial create high quality tiling meshes in a short amount of time.

Standard Materials   Wood, Metal, Various Stones and Blocks

creating perfectly tiling meshes in Zbrush  a workflow to create perfectly tiled normal maps on perfectly tiled lowpoly geometry, especially useful for cliff faces and rough stone surfaces.

Uncharted 2 Texture Workflow in ZBrush

How To Create Tiled Textures With Nonuniform Stones Using Zbrush


For importing stuff, there's a whole import section on the Outerra forum.   people have been bringing in all sorts of things. I expect you've seen it  :Smile: 

that link's cool you posted, thanks -  clouds are cool too. 

I suspecting you're aware of city Engine? another cool thing that would help make planetary scale stuff. 

youre probably aware of it but if not -  

Esri CityEngine Trailer - YouTube

Esri CityEngine | 3D Modeling Software for Urban Environments

create procedural cities in no time

Examples - CityEngine and Unity - YouTube
Watch 1. CityEngine Basics | Procedural Inc. Episodes | Tech & Gadgets Videos | Blip
CityEngine Example Videos

people are using it for in game stuff

Unreal Game Engine featuring CityEngine - YouTube
Unreal Game Engine featuring CityEngine - Making Of 

Examples - CityEngine and CryEngine - YouTube


sorry - a bit of a 'link dump'!!!

cheers
Jeremy

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## Carbus

Awesome links! In June I'm starting an online course for Zbrush and I started wondering if I could use it to build environments and even Matte Painting! Thanks a lot!

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## monks

Links dump is fine here! I got Max, Maya etc on educational license as I'm doing a short course in Max at the mo. I've seen CityEngine- really cool. I think that's the way to go myself. I think Urban Pad is being rebooted. Urban Pad Reboot/Successor ? [poll]
I'd never heard of dDo, but I'm glad to see that they're offering a non-commerical version. I've got imagesynth somewhere, don't know if you've ever heard of that- it's a texturer.
 What online course is that Carbus?..isn't that a character from Baldur's Gate??? :-D

monks

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## jezelf

> Awesome links! In June I'm starting an online course for Zbrush and I started wondering if I could use it to build environments and even Matte Painting! Thanks a lot!


hi

@ Carbus - Yeah most game environments use Zbrush or Mudbox now. Check the link below on the Megatexture stuff.

Matte painting is certainly possible. I'm looking into that, myself. I was taking screen grabs form Outerra, then model detail stuff in Max, texture, render and composite, work into it all...well I say that, I haven't really started much  :Smile:  - mostly in my imagination with the other 200 projects  :Smile:  . It's worth working out just how much detail you actually need, or you could waste hours adding detail hardly seen when a photo might be better.

You could use Zbrush to sculpt and environment and then import to Vue and add millions of trees etc quickly. render the stuff out, edit back into PS. Zbrush is normally used ( in the game world )as a detailer, we use Max/Maya for lower triangle count in game meshes. If you just want to do matte paintings, then, yeah, Zbrush is fine.  3DSmax/Maya/Blender etc - usually import into zbrush and you add details. Good luck on your course - sounds exciting.

Here's a good tutorial for matte painting workflow using 3Dsmax - but you could use Blender for the 3D bit if you dont have Max/Maya <other software> , which is free.  check out Vue  - that can help you out. cool pic here used it -by Dragos Jieanu,  you can see more info on that image and more of his work here . Here's a vid with someone using Vue with PS for a matte painting  though you can use it to a better effect, but it shows a work flow. Populating environments with foliage and then render that for a layer in PS etc. I've yet to try it all myself, but there's a cool workflow in there somewhere.

@ Monks - I've not heard of the Urban pad thing. I'll look into that more, thanks.

here's another cool link  in the workflow for making this terrain for Quake Wars - 5yrs old now, but worth a read. I studied it when I was working out what I was doing. It's a similar kind of thing. They use mudbox so if you have that already,  take a look.



A Simple First Megatexture
Advanced Megatexture ( the image above)


Enjoy!
Jeremy

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## monks

Been fiddling with Max, going thorugh tuts and stuff. Building facade using displacement maps:



Procedural rock made in Max, in Outerra



monks

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## Thorf

Wow, what an amazing project!  I will definitely be watching this with great interest.

Monks, I'm really interested in your extensive use of real world terrain data to build up specific areas of Middle-earth.  I have been researching how to go about doing exactly that for a project I'm working on, but I haven't really got the specifics figured out yet.  Could you give me an example of your workflow, including what programs you use to process real world DEM data into your own map?

From your post at the top of this page, it sounds like you do most of your editing using layers in World Machine.  Did I understand that correctly?  I haven't used World Machine much, though I am interested in the professional version's tile support, which seems to me to be an essential feature for working on a detailed fantasy world.  I didn't realise that it was able to allow splicing of real world data into fantasy maps.

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## monks

Hi Thorf, thanks!
 Yep, you need World Machine really because of the tiling suport. Photoshop is also pretty useful but not essential. Although having said that I'm working on a game world for a small studio at the moment and I'm using a new technique if you like, which requires CS5 or 6..I thnk. Basically it uses content aware fill, which if used in conjunction with satellite imagery produces some really good results and it's also a lot faster than my previous method. Literally an hour to set up masks (first time I didi it so probably faster) and one click, wait a few minutes and you have your entire terrain filled in with no unslightly seams. You can even use iot to process satellite dems. For example, say you have some satellite data that has too much height variation in it. You can use content aware fill to even out the heights, get rid of lake areas, etc. But I did all of me-dem without that. I did use the PS warp tool though to shape mountain ranges to fit the mountains on the map.
 I use Global Mapper as well. It's not essential but you might need some way of stitching downloaded satellite imagery together. Global Mapper is a painless way to do it. There are probably other free GIS progs out there that can open up georeffed tiles as well. With Global Mapper I can also export any area I need. It has full tiling support. In addition- although this bit is definitely not essential, I use it to create proper flowing river beds. In September Global Mapper is getting a new feature which will allow for tapering river beds. World Machine will probably get it soon- although I couldn't say when. World Machine can do river beds but you can't make them taper from wide at the estuaries to narrow at the mountains. This might not be that important for you though. But only use Global Mapper for modelling if you're comfortable with drawing contours. Photoshop can also be used to taper river beds. There are some tuts on here to do that.
 I use a two layer approach to building. A bottom layer built from contours and gridded (turned into a 3D surface) in Global Mapper. This could be done easily enough though in a paint prog or WM itself, although you don;t get the degree of control since if you're using painted greyscales with blur, you can't vary the amount of blur over the surface liek you can with gridded contours. The bottom layer describes the broad height changes of the landscape. A second layer consisting of satellite data is added to it, with masks to avoid river beds and such. This time around I'm also using a multiplier mask in World Machine which basically gives you more control over the overall height of the terrain. The multiplier mask just rescales the heights on a global scale. It's useful to give you a very quick way to make global changes.
 If you're building maps of greater resolution than the satellite imagery (90m/pixel), ie almost always, you'll need to add a little bit more detail to them in World Machine. the best way to do that is to use a WM device which selects for convexity in the terrain, -that way you can avoid adding noise and choking up river valleys- that's if that bothers you...:-D That's pretty simple to do.
 World Machine now has a Height Splitter device which allows for merging of different terrain inputs by height on the map which acheives something like the content aware fill, but I've not tried it yet so I can't say if it's any better. I do know that the dev has said that at the moment there is no control over the blend transitions between terrains so it still needs improving a little. That's on the dev roadmap
 I did a lot of processing in thw layout mode of World Machine. This time around I've opted to rely more on Photoshop than World Machine to do that because this time around the terrain is much smaller. If you're dealing with tiles or a really large terrain then World Machine is probably more convenient than PS.
 I also use Wilbur which is free. Wilbur is real life saver for many things. I use Wilbur routinely to process any terrain coming out of Global Mapper since Global Mapper sometimes outputs heights which Worlda Mchine considers "out of range". Very smple to do though but always work in tiles that can fit inside Wilbur. wilbur 64 maxes at at around 16K so it's not a problem- you'd have to test your limits out with your system. 

 So for me: Global Mapper -> World Machine, with some PS.
 Paint prog -> World Machine another option.
 All in WM also an option.
 Please feel free to ask me any more questions, specifics and such.  :Smile: 

monks

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## Thorf

Thanks for the speedy reply, Monks.  You've given me a lot to think about.

I've been swithering between using satellite imagery and building my own height maps.  Satellite imagery is very pretty and realistic (obviously!), but it's also limited colour-wise.  For a while I was thinking of going that road, but I eventually decided to go for height maps and shading instead.

Having said that, if I understand correctly, you use satellite imagery in the form of DEMs to make up height maps, don't you?  That is of course always an option.  But I don't yet have the process down to a manageable form with the software available to me.  I may go this way eventually, in the pursuit of detail, but for now I've been working with Photoshop to generate the base height maps and Wilbur to wear them down into something that looks at least semi-realistic.  World Machine looks nice, but I don't have the budget to invest in it right now.  Same with Global Mapper.

Thanks again - I will definitely be back to ask you more detailed questions at some point.   :Smile:

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## monks

Yes, Wilbur is a great app, especially for erosion- incise flows- I'm  sure you know about the tuts on Wilbur's website already. And PS will be  fine for the base maps. Try downloading some satellite tiffs. Open them  in PS. Then use the layer blend modes to add them to your base. I think you could do it all in PS  fairly easily. Set up your sea/land mask and rivers. Then blur them so  that you have white falling off to black at the coasts and river edges.  Then apply that as a multiplication mask to the satellite imagery. The  multi mask should create falloff of the heights towards your coasts and  rivers. Then apply some erosion and stuff in Wilbur. 

monks

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## Lol Rob

I have been looking for a while for a map of Middle Earth just like this! I think its amazing what your doing and can't wait for anything close to the finished project! I was wondering if you have an official site about this or if everything there is to learn about this map is on this forum. I would also love to help but seeing as I am terrible with computers I was wondering if there is any way I can donate some cash to the cause? Maybe over Paypal or something?

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## Redrobes

Hello Rob, The main site for the project is MeDEM - The Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project which has links into the gallery where most of the work is renders of works in progress. The project is basically always in progress where sometimes it gets more progress than at other times. There is a forum there which is quite rarely used and we started another forum for the 3D world of middle earth in the Outerra engine. So you can explore the world we made in 3D using the free Outerra program tech demo and using the extra download of the MEDem data for it. If people are interested then we would like to add 3D models of some of the 'man' made items in the world. There is a forum about those places which again is not heavily trafficked but post notifications do go out.

As for funding - its just a side hobby and its always been a free to download non commercial kind of thing with no affiliation to the Tolkien group so we cant take any monies for it. If you wanted to donate then making some 3D models for the lands would be the most useful and welcome.

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## Lol Rob

Thank you for the quick respons and I will be sure to check out the website. All thow I doubt I can be of any help with making maps I'll give it a shot! I have one more question about this whole thing, what is the end goal? Will this just be a map of middle earth that you can explore? Or will this just go on indefinetly untill every detail of tolkien's world is spot on? No matter what I love what your doing, I just like having somthing to look forward to. Thank you!

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## Redrobes

The end goal is somewhat vague. If there is one then its to have fun making a map of Middle Earth. The problem is that Middle Earth spanned ages so were only drawing it at one point in time. Even then, people disagree about the exact shapes of things and the layouts of stuff - esp buildings. Tolkiens map was somewhat rough to say the least. Many people have interpreted a more detailed map based on Tolkiens and the text in the book. This is just one such interpretation tho we have tried to get physical geography correct so water flows downhill at all places etc. The lack of slope on the Anduin is a bit extreme tho.

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## Lol Rob

Well for what its worth I think your interpretation is great. I have been looking into DEMs and at the things on the youtube chanel and I was wondering if you could tell me the most user friendly software for doing things like simulating mountains and landscapes. I would like to try and help but I will need to teach myself how. So if you could just give me one or two good programs and stuff, next time I post Ill have at least something to show for it. Thanks!

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## monks

Hi, not been on here for a while- don't get notifications for some reason- I can reply shortly- just need to post this update.

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## monks

Some piccys of the biomes. This is alpha though since it's a quick hack to preview a texture we kinda had lying around.











Full Size here: http://www.me-

dem.me.uk/galleries/Outerra1/gallery.htm


Looking ahead now to getting some better data into Outerra; terrain and biomes. We're going to do some development on the textures. Mordor colouration needs changing. Snow needs taking out. The whole northern end of the map needs tundra and much less snow. There's a few things we need to do...

monks

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## monks

Hi Rob, I use World Machine Pro. That's the most important piece of software. I also use Photoshop CS6, and Global Mapper. Global Mapper is important to our project as everything is stored in there with earth coordinates. You don't necessarily need it though. Another useful software is Wilbur- it's free.
 You can get involved with us if you want. We're looking for 3D modellers more than anything. We're currently in a bit of a hiatus but things will be moving ahead again in the coming months.

Register over here if you want
http://worlds.outercraft.com/forum/index.php

monks

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## Redrobes

This has been a bit of surreal weekend. I got a post saying reddit was going off the wall then next we had people asking us for interviews and video chat. Now we seem to have made front page of Boing Boing.

I hope this all isnt a prelude to us getting the infamous C&D from Tolkien estate now... that would suck big time. But you never know we might get some traction now on getting some help doing the 3D models for the world.

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## monks

:Smile: 

 Working on the terrain to get it ready for models...! Finally had a chance to get it back out of storage.
 New Outerra release also coming soon. Improved biomes!

monks

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## Carbus

Wow nice project! Have you guys considered using VUE for the renders? As far as I know, you can easily export the files from WM to Vue, where you can get a better render quality and features also! Again great job!

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## monks

> Wow nice project! Have you guys considered using VUE for the renders? As far as I know, you can easily export the files from WM to Vue, where you can get a better render quality and features also! Again great job!


Thanks Carbus!....Yes, Vue is sweet, as is Terragen 3..I have a license for that, but not Vue unfortunately. If you want to do one feel free..:-D We plan to use Terragen to create the source textures for our procedural textures/biomes once we upgrade the engine.
 I'm going to be using Unity Game Engine to pre-visualise the sites as we model them. 


Hey we have some kind of interview coming up with one of your Brazilian tech magazines (INFO | Notcias, reviews, downloads, dicas e fruns de tecnologia e internet)   :Smile: 


monks

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## Carbus

> Thanks Carbus!....Yes, Vue is sweet, as is Terragen 3..I have a license for that, but not Vue unfortunately. If you want to do one feel free..:-D We plan to use Terragen to create the source textures for our procedural textures/biomes once we upgrade the engine.
>  I'm going to be using Unity Game Engine to pre-visualise the sites as we model them. 
> 
> 
> Hey we have some kind of interview coming up with one of your Brazilian tech magazines (INFO | Notcias, reviews, downloads, dicas e fruns de tecnologia e internet)  
> 
> 
> monks


Ohh nice! INFO is one of the bests tech magazines from Brazil, you are in good hands  :Very Happy: . When they release the interview please share it with us!
Well Im still learning to use VUE, trying to do some tutorials and stuff, following a more realistic feeling (manly from Dax Pandhi, a great VUE moddeler). When I'm more comfortable with VUE I'll try something from Middle-Earth  :Very Happy:  
Keep up the good work!

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## monks

> Ohh nice! INFO is one of the bests tech magazines from Brazil, you are in good hands . When they release the interview please share it with us!
> Well Im still learning to use VUE, trying to do some tutorials and stuff, following a more realistic feeling (manly from Dax Pandhi, a great VUE moddeler). When I'm more comfortable with VUE I'll try something from Middle-Earth  
> Keep up the good work!


Nice work, cold mountain and the maps! Good luck with your journey. Dax was cited as being the best terrain artist in the world wasn't he? 

monks

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## Carbus

> Nice work, cold mountain and the maps! Good luck with your journey. Dax was cited as being the best terrain artist in the world wasn't he? 
> 
> monks


He got more than 10.000 hours of working on VUE, so I bet he is very good!  :Very Happy:  Already bought his book and some online classes. The problem is that VUE is tricky at many things, but a very powerful tool. I started learning WM too, another excellent software.

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## monks

> He got more than 10.000 hours of working on VUE, so I bet he is very good!  Already bought his book and some online classes. The problem is that VUE is tricky at many things, but a very powerful tool. I started learning WM too, another excellent software.


 Yes, overall Vue is probably the renderer to go for, but I don't have the $ to invest in every license. I already have Terragen, and with its emphasis being more on larger scale stuff, I think it probably suits our project better. I prefer a node interface as well having used World Machine for ages now.

monks

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## monks

Hi, we have an update. We've improved the textures- mainly an alignment fix, and some improvements with vegetation distribution. These look now how they are supposed to look at this stage in development. Mordor still has a little snow mind you, but I think you'll agree it's starting to look something like it should.












Check out the new gallery here: Outerra Biomes




Looking ahead now to getting some better data into Outerra; terrain and biomes. We're going to do some development on the textures. Mordor colouration needs changing. Snow needs taking out. The whole northern end of the map needs tundra and much less snow. There's a few things we need to do...but I think we can make some major improvements quickly.  :Smile: 


monks

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## Lyandra

These latest images of the planet and the biomes look very spectacular.

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## Redrobes

The state of the MeDem terrain on Outerra has improved since these images but, for some reason I cant explain, I have yet to see them posted in the outerra forums. Cameni was adjusting the importer for them and setting up better tree shading based on the data we provide but the last I heard, there was some issue with them compiling it to Outerra format using the AMD card that was being used at the time. The new implementation has the terrain colour and the tree shading values sent to it. I believe that the snowline was adjusted to better match the Tolkien map since outerra uses fixed biome parameters at present. Anyways, the trees in the latest incarnation are much more rich and vibrant than these images and look a lot closer to the original map.

This is the last image I have:
http://i1.minus.com/ibaCJkTOMaxFEc.jpg

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## Lyandra

Thanks for sharing it! It looks good.  :Smile:

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## Naima

Awesome is Outerra a tool available for making fantasy worlds?

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## Vellum

Hey Monks  how's this going?  not been around much lately but was thinking about your project.

V

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## Stefano Pellegrini

Hi monks,
I'm a designer and I decided to re-impaginate LOTR putting before all the chapter a map with the pat made in it.
To do this a designed a big map, usign "Atlans of Middle Earth".

https://www.behance.net/gallery/3249...the-Rings-book

I saw your work and is amazing, and I love it, very realistic and detailed.

I've always wanted to create an "orographic" map of Middle Eart, but I am not able, and your work could allow me to do it.

May I ask you to send me a vecctor version of your map, or a B/W version...or can you help me in some way?

THANK YOU KINDLY

Stefano

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## Redrobes

So a little bit of thread necromancy here but I have been doing a little bit of work on the MeDEM map recently.

It has been bothering me that I did not have a complete set of the files necessary to make up the final map. So I got back in touch with Monks and checked to see if he had the latest topo rasters and after a bit of searching about I think we have a set of them that maybe were not the absolute latest but were a set that was within a couple of weeks before the end.

Monks makes the terrain in Global Mapper and a number of other desktop apps (and basically does the real work...) and I take those rasters and run them through a series of my utilities until it exports the final set as Outerra tiles which then, either Monks or Cameni take in to make the Outerra files necessary to run it on that 3D viewer.

Before that final stage tho, I make up a set of 2D tiles for use with my ViewingDale and export them so that I can pan and zoom around in it.

Now at the time we halted there were a number of issues to resolve. First up was that, at the time, Outerra could not render lakes. It could only do sea. So we set all of the terrain for all of the lakes down to -ve height values to force Outerra to render sea where lakes should have been. Looked nice at the time but it means that the topo area around the lakes have steep cliffs going down the sides. Another issue was that we did not have Erebor, The Lonely Mountain in the map at all. It was marked as a placement but the terrain was flat there.

To fix the lowered topo areas for lakes meant getting a set of tiles from Monks without the artificially reduced heights but we did not find the set of them. I think the set I have was a temporary set for making up Outerra and that the parameter to raise and lower the lakes was something adjustable in Global Mapper or a similar app which Monks could have changed easily. But we discovered that the desktop apps used to make the topo tiles were not compatible any longer so the reduced height lakes had to stay.

But I wanted to put in an Erebor. So instead of going through the usual process where Monks would hand edit up some contours in Global Mapper and then export all of the tiles with the new mountain in it, I had to manually add in a mountain at the correct location using some height values garnered from somewhere.

Looking on the web people said that Mount Taranaki in New Zealand was the closest thing to it. I had come across this odd volcanic phenomenon before but didnt recognize the name. Its a real lonely mountain in the South West point of the North Island of New Zealand. So I got some real DEM values for that area and scaled up a bit of height map to the correct scale to make it fit into the MeDem map. Then by adding that in and rendering out the final map we have Erebor in place matching up with all of the other coloured up places.

Since previous I have also fixed up some of the snow lines and adjusted a few of the place names to fit better but there are many many places with small and oddly positioned names. Theres too many to fix up now and these were all placed using Global Mapper so the source files for these are hard to obtain now.

Since I have been made an admin of the guild and can do the leaflet maps of the community worlds and other large maps, I have uploaded a copy of the ViewingDale tile set to the Leaflet Slippy Map area so you can now have a look at the whole map.

So have a click on the link below and heres a couple of Erebor pictures.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/l...php?type=medem

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## monks

I used Mt Shasta in the US. But that one might be better. Looking good!  :Wink: 

Sorry I missed the messages above. I've not been working on the Project for a few years. 

I'm more involved in Tolkien Research these days- that is, the study of his works and texts.

monks

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## Ilanthar

Looks great, Red! This is such an ambitious project, it deserves to be reanimated  :Wink: .

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## ChickPea

This is a super cool project! Great work by everyone involved. Great to see a large version of the map hosted at the Guild too.

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## Redrobes

I thought that having a version of it on the guild would be a good idea as it doesnt really have a home any more. But without Erebor it was a bit odd so I think I had to add that in before hosting it. At least now I have a back up of this version so I can rebuild this one and make some more changes to it if need be. But I don't foresee myself doing a great deal more on it. You should check out Outerra and I am not sure if the latest version will display MeDem map on it now but that app has come a long way and I think if it were possible to import this map into it again I guess I would probably try to.

Monks is doing some superb work with his Tolkien research and has thrown up a lot of really interesting ideas - when I am able to keep up with it.

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## mapmage

*sniff* this is beautiful. Ten stars.

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## PerroMuchacho

Hello everyone!

This is my first post in this forum, so let me introduce myself a bit. I am a Polish cartographer and I work creating 3D renders of old maps, and I was recently thinking about creating a 3D render using DEM data of Middle Earth. My search online took me here, as most of the previous links I found were either dead or didn't contain any useful file.

Is there a chance this is the right please to ask for them? Any way I can get hold on those elevation files of Middle Earth?

Thanks in advance and best regards.

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