Help Finding The Right Heightmapping Software for A Project

[LordIndy]

Ok I'm new here and didn't post an introduction, so "hi all" . Haven't lurked alot either in recent years, but I'm running short on project time so I've decided to just be forward and make this post and defer to those more knowledgeable than myself on mapping projects.

In short, Ive spent about two weeks experimenting with more programs than I can count but have been unable to find one that does what I need. In fact most terrain/heightmap programs seem to be entirely randomized based on fractal algorithms.

The Project:
I have a high-res 2d map (~13,966 x 6,773 pix; 1pix=1.86km2) with continental outlines based on realistic tectonic maps for a fictitious planet about 62% size of earth. I have an idea of where mountain ranges and lowlands (etc) need to be based on the tectonic activity and geological history, but I do not have any sort of detailed contours or such. I need to take this map and create a detailed (psudo-realistic) heightmap, however I don't have years to manually paint a heightmap in a raster graphics program or a 3d terrain program. So I'm looking for a program that I can create heightmaps and/or terrain to be exported as a heightmap, but it needs to be somewhere between random generation and the time intensive terrain painting tools. Specifically I'm looking for something where I can do something similar to lasso-selecting a region, choose to preform some sort of terrain modification like raise terrain or even add a mountain range, and have the program do most of the work through falloff calculations and such, so I only have to spend limited time refining later or automatically refine through some erosion algorithms or something.

What I need in my software of choice:
1) Import 2D raster image for use as a guide for further terrain editing
2) Assign heights using a area select / lasso-select tool
3) Export as heightmap or 3D terrain file
4) Not require using fine-scale paint tools for a ton of work
5) Create a decent looking heightmap or a heightmap that I can erode, filter, etc in another program for a realistic result.

> Maybe this program exists, maybe it doesn't.
> Maybe someone whose more familiar with Photoshop or Gimp has a technique they can share?
> Maybe there's a terrain program that can produce a generalized heightmap for me, and then use another program that can do the detailing to the heightmap?
> I'm open to pretty much any potential solution that is faster than manually painting an entire planet lol.

Thanks for your consideration and time!

[Korash]

It sounds like you might be interested in Wilbur...you will need to search the software threads for an up to date link because it moved hosting...

What progs have you tried?

Sorry, at work and not much time...

[waldronate]

As Korash suggested, http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...un+with+wilbur may be helpful. Its results are usually more plausible with smaller pixel sizes, but it might be good enough for what you ant to do.

[LordIndy]

I kinda glanced over Wilbur x64, it definitely appears to have more options that I thought it had. This seems like a decent candidate, ill have to spend today fooling with it; still concerned it will be too time consuming. Thanks Korash!

Going to look at that right now Waldronate, thanks!

---

Here a list of the programs I tried, excluding whatever others I've already deleted. I've been hanging onto a few of them I think I might be able to use in combination with something else to produce the results i'm looking for.

These I used with some depth:
> Earth Sculptor [no go]
> Sculptris [Nope lol]
> Terragen 1, 2, & 3 [no go]
> Universe Sandbox [no go]
> Sketchup 8 [no go]
> Blender 2.73 [maybe if desperate]
> GIMP 2 [maybe]
> Photoshop [maybe]
> Fractal Terrains [might still be of some use]

These I sort of glanced over:
> Wilbur x64 [thought it only had basic paint features]
> Ter_G Terrain Editor [basic paint features, small levels]
> World Machine x64 220 [Candidate, needs further review]
> Picogen-Simplex [Scene rendering]
> QGIS 2.8.1 [Steep learning curve, haven’t made a determination yet]
> SAGA GIS 2.1.2 [Steep learning curve, haven’t made a determination yet]
> Fractal Mapper 8.1F [no go]
> Fractscape [no go]
> Anteworld – 0.8.4.5372 [I think I got the wrong download, doesn’t even look like a terrain editor]
> Inkscape 0.91 [not looking to deal with vector images right now]

Haven’t tried yet:
> Celestia 1.6.1
> L3DT 14.05
> Bryce [don't have a demo or copy yet]

Programs I'm having difficulties getting to run correctly:
> Grome 32 & 64bit
> Carrara 6
> PnP Terrain Creator CE
> Deimos 5 / RGB2HSV.tar
> ER1U / Erode.tar.gz
> Dem2Rad_0.2.1
> GeoTools 12.3

[Redrobes]

You can create DEM style height maps from contours that you make yourself. I posted my technique here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...l=1#post191015

You can look at Global Mapper too which is not free but very powerful.

I know that Anteworld has some terrain editing ability but its rather limited. Its more of a real time viewer.

Normally you would manually input the basic contours in and then let rip on it with some kind of procedural tool to make it look more realistic. I use my own so I dont have a lot of experience with other peoples apps. I think probably World Machine may be your best bet. At MEDem (http://me-dem.me.uk/galleries/Outerra2/gallery.htm) the guy who does the terrain modelling uses Global Mapper and then a little Wilbur and some real DEM's like the NASA / shuttle's public domain SRTM downloads to build up a realistic terrain. A little random noise and some clever blending of it all goes into the mix. Then the result of all of it gets exported to Outerra (which is sorta Anteworld) to view it. But its a heck of a lot of work - you gotta be committed to the cause to endure the process.

[LordIndy]

Played with Wilbur a little bit, but not as much as expected. Begining to think its not anymore time saving than manually creating heightmaps.

Thanks Redrobes it's been really helpful so far; so if I'm reading this correctly its something like:
-> hand draw the continental outlines
-> Scan and reduce to two colors black/white
-> color fill oceans black and continents white
-> do contour steps from highest peak to lowest ocean trench
-> muck it up with some noise and blur
-> Multiply original overtop
-> Do river work
-> Slight blur
-> copy/paste some real world DEM if wanted somewhere in those steps
-> then run it through a program(s) [Global Mapper, World Machine] do the detailing based on some sort of erosion, biome, etc options?
SAMPLE_TEST.png

Sample image steps:
255 / 8 = 31.875
~ 32 per step
1= 255,255,255 Highest Peak
2= 223,223,223 Land
3= 191,191,191 Land
4= 159,159,159 Land
5= 127,127,127 Land meeting Waterlevel
6= 95,95,95 Skip
7= 63,63,63 Extent of continental shelf
8= 31,31,31 Open Ocean
9= 0,0,0 Lowest Trench

Gaussian Blur of 30H&30V
Multiply Original over current
Gaussian Blur of 1H&1V

Just want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly; whipped up a quick sample.

It sounds a lot like my initial workflow, but I wasn't sure it would be very fast, nor what/if any programs would complete the finishing details.
What programs do you use after creating the basic height map?
Am I going to have to create like 256 steps/shades manually, or should I only do like ~20 and let the program(s) fill in the gaps?

[EDIT] I'll definitely look into/demo Global Mapper; spending money is definitely an option in this case.

[waldronate]

Played with Wilbur a little bit, but not as much as expected. Begining to think its not anymore time saving than manually creating heightmaps.

A critical point with large maps and Wilbur is to not do everything at once. If you want a 14000-wide map, start with a 700-wide map (or even 350-wide) and do noise/basin fill/precipiton erode; simple resample by 2 in each dimension and cycle again. Repeat until desired size is achieved. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=28052 was done with this technique (the full-res version has moved to http://www.fracterra.com/wilburiax.jpg since the article was written).

If you set the size for 350, loading your full-res land mask as a selection in Wilbur will automatically downsize it to the current image dimensions, allowing a single mask to be used for all sizes. Cleaning up edges is a good idea, so loading the land mask after each resize, inverting it, and setting the sea area to your desired low value will clean up the square edges.

Another good tip with Wilbur is to pull the continental maps out individually and reproject them to an equal-area projection. Wilbur's erosion and river-finding algorithms assume a planar basis and trying to do everything in an equirectangular projection will get some awful high-latitude polar artifacts.

I was looking back at the earlier posts and I saw that you had posted a couple of terrain masks. After popping out the data in Photoshop, resizing the masks to 512x512 and then pushing things through Wilbur starting at 128x128 resolution, I got the following output in about 10 minutes of total time:
ab.jpg

One-handed because I was holding a baby in the other.

I didn't do any special treatment here, just started at 128x128 resolution, scaled the original image to about 15000 in vertical extent, clipped the water to the water mask (I didn't keep the subsea features), and then did the "noise/basin fill/precipiton erode/simple resample by 2 in each dimension" for 128, 256, 512, and 2014 sizes. I didn't enforce the original water mask (load land mask, invert, set to -1) until the 512 resolution size. At the 1024 size, I pushed water down to -1000 and did a little precipiton erosion to wear down the coastline a little. I also added the river overlay to show the major waterways.

The fun thing about Wilbur is that this process works equally well with just a 2-level mask ("coast" and "mountain") to show the major landforms. The hardest part of the problem is getting enough roughness. If you have specific rivers that you want to be present, it's possible to do that was well by having a separate land mask with the rivers cut out from the coastline. Load that mask and do a fill basins before adding any noise and the rivers will become the low parts. If you want specific watersheds, you can rough them in by using a selection of the outline and a linear gradient with operation=Add pointing upstream.

[Redrobes]

Personally I wouldn't discount Wilbur as its real good and would get you a long way with what you need. All of the apps usually need a starting point tho and thats what making your own contours can help with.

I'll describe it again tho. You start off with a 2D sketch or rough map of what you want. You make it greyscale and then what I like to do is set it so that the darkest point on the map is mid grey going up to white - just so that I can see what it looked like before. Then take a black pen a few pixels wide and draw in all of the countours so you end up with a 2D image of wibbly lines. Make sure they join up correctly or go right to the edge of the image.

Next, use the contrast tool to whack it right up so that its just black contour lines and white background and no shades of grey. Then use the flood fill to fill in every alternate contour region. So you should end up with a set of zebra stripes. The more stripes you have the better.

Now when thats done, figure out how many stripes you have counting from the lowest altitude on the map to the highest. Divide 255 into that many and lets say you had 16 stripes so thats shades of grey of 16 each. Start at the lowest stripe and keep it black, take the next white one and flood fill it with grey shade 16, take the next black one and flood fill it 32 take the next white one fill it 48 etc all the way up.

Now you have a height map which is all shaded but banded in quantized values of 16. Use a large blur to smooth out the bands. The more bands you made the easier this process will be. You can add the noise at this point.

Like Waldronate says, its a good idea to start somewhat small like 1024 sized image and then add a bit of noise, blur it, then scale up by a factor of 2 then add some more noise then blur it some more then scale up by 2 again till you have a suitable sized bitmap.

Once you have it at that state then you can push it through Wilbur or other apps to refine it and add better water courses etc. It gets a lot harder from this point to make it look truly realistic but that is the challenge. At this point you can multiply in some real NASA mountains and lowlands to make it look a little more realistic. Nobody has a perfect solution to getting this last bit right but some apps like World Machine do a fair job at it.

If at any point you want to see your height map in 3D you can use my little free app:
http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/cgi-bin/vi...dragons_flight

Save the height map as Height.bmp, put the app in the same folder and run it. It will complain you dont have a colour.bmp either but ignore that one. If you used a 1024x1024 bitmap then press '6', if you used 512x512 then press '4' and the keys to move around are shown in the initial help dialog.

If you use Global Mapper then you can add in GIS style vector contours and get it to generate the 3D height map from them. You can then export it. The advantage there is that you can go back in and add more of them and edit them. In MeDEM we use Global Mapper style.

[LordIndy]

Sorry for the delay, weekend and family matters came up, no real progress was made.

I probably just need to spend more time fooling around with Wilbur, don't plan on discounting it entirely but I'm really looking for the core program i'll be working with for this project. There's still a couple programs I need to give the good looksee; but I'll probably just draw pretty heavy on real data and fractal filters and mostly use 2D software that I'm familiar with by trade simply due to time constraints. I should be able to get a good result but it might not be the quality I normally strive for. I appreciate all the feedback, it has really helped identify some key personal skill deficiencies I'll need to address at a later date.

Kudos Redrobes on the MeDEM project by the way, it's way impressive the work you all have done.

[johnvanvliet]

from post #4
Celestia 1.6.1

this displays full planets ( i create planets ,moons and asteroids and smallbodies for this program )
it dose not make them
if you pull the last SVN code it's version will be 1.7 not the very old 1.6.1
1.7 uses QT4 for the GUI now ( we dumped GTK / GLUT )


and Gimp

the current STABLE 2.8.14 is 8 bit ONLY
gimp3 will handle 32 bit and 16 bit images

the current DEVELOPMENT unstable 2.9 dose
-- odd numbering is all DEVELOPMENT ONLY and all even numbers are release
you can pull the code from git and build on windows using MinGW
( MS visual studio is usable but a royal pain to try)

and Mingw is FREE ( gpl)