Middle Earth DEM Project

[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.

[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!


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

[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

[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.

[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.

[monks]

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

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

monks

[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

[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

[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

[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 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 ?