Originally Posted by monks
As a photoshop user without access to some of your neat software, I'd love to hear how you used them and what you think of them.
Sigurd
What did you use Global Mapper for?
How did you use your software?
As a photoshop user without access to some of your neat software, I'd love to hear how you used them and what you think of them.
Sigurd
What did you use Global Mapper for?
Wow, the veg looks a lot better man. Great job!
Yeh, ok two mountains coming right up! ...for the print.
Hi Sigurd, I should have included Wilbur and L3DT so here's a revision, roughly in order I used them. Wilbur was used to respan the .ter heightfield. L3DT to respan the .hfz. I'll probably end up using GeoControl as well at some point, but I haven't thus far.
Photoshop
Wintopo Pro
Global Mapper
Leveller
Wilbur
World Machine
L3DT
GTS
It's a long story and I cannot lie, this map certainly falls outside the month timescale for this competition haha...! This has taken a LONG time, and we're only just beginning. but more of that elsewhere. You can check out here:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...6276#post46276
http://www.me-dem.org/index.php?opti...oard&Itemid=43
I'm speaking more for the ME-DEM project here long term, rather than the competition entry. The things about this map is that it's built on terrain. We figured that without terrain we couldn't achieve the things that we wanted to; well it is called the Middle Earth DEM project after all. We decided that once you have terrain, you have the most fundamental requirement of a map, terrain; z data. Any manner of map can then be produced from the terrain as basis.
The difference with this terrain is that we set out from the outset to try and make a hydrolically sound elevation model. That is, if we dropped water on the terrain model in say a physics sim such as GTS, the water would flow along the courses in the topographic map refs we used. That's a tough call. Films and games don't require this. I think we were considered a little nuts to be honest. We're still not entirely sure how successful we've been, but I think with a little more work we'll have exactly what we set out to do frankly. For most people, the appeal of terrain is for still renders and gameplay. We're in it for the terrain's sake and the maps.
PS was used to stitch the original topographic map sources together from role playing material (Iron Crown Enterprises). It was one at 23K x 23K. That was scaled to 20K. 1 pixel = 200m.
The problem with Photoshop (back then, and practically speaking now) is that you only have 8 bit greyscales; 256 discrete levels of height data. Yes we now have 16 bit but working with those is kinda hard on the eyes. You just can't distinguish between those shades of grey. You can try indexed colour schemes but that starts getting silly imo. I knew that one could
interpolate/ grid a triangulated mesh from vector contours in Wintopo (and other places). So I decided to draw contours. This way I could pretty much ensure that the rivers would flow in the final triangulated terrain model more or less accurately. At these scales (back when I approached this stage of the project) there ws really no other way of doing this HUGe map. PS has some pretty nifty mem management. In Wintopo you have one touch vectorisation of raster contour lines done in PS. Then you have the task of assigning z values (height) to the 3D vectors. If you draw contours of equal height spacing, then that's a synch, but I could not do that for reasons I'll not go in to.
You then export as a shapefile (.shp) from Wintopo- GIS industry standards. Then you take that into Global Mapper and triangulate the 3d vector network. This gives you your dem (terrain model).
If you want to save yourself time, I'd advise going straight into Global mapper. You can cut out the PS and Wintopo stages by vectorising 3d contours directly over a topo ref in there.
Do you prefer to draw raster contours with a graphics tablet (whch I did) or with mouse click? Hmm, I'd still prefer PS myself- especially for massive jobs like this., but it all depends.
As I say it's really all about the rivers for us and the topo refs. If you don't need that kind of fidelity in your terrain model, and/or you're not trying to "reproduce" what's in a topo map, then any one of those apps will work for you. All of them have an overlay feature whereby you can import a topo ref map and model terrain to it. But if you're into maps, then GM is the place to be imo.
Another major factor for us is scale. We wanted to build big so my favourite apps to work with are always going to be those that can do this. The most capable of the apps are: Global Mapper, L3DT and WM Pro 2.0. GTS is in there as well but it doesn't ave a paintbrush style interface. It's an erosion-texturer. It sits at the end of the terrain modelling process.
Thanks to the Terrain Summit and the developers there (the TS is down for the moment, due to come back online soon), we have a dem file format that can be used to go between all of these apps (L3DT, Global Mapper, GTS, WM, Wilbur). Leverll and GeoControl will follow I believe.
monks
Last edited by monks; 01-27-2009 at 07:53 AM.
What's happened to http://www.me-dem.org ? It has completely disappeared!
One of the Admins is upgrading the whole site to a newer version with more bells and whistles. Were all assured that its going to be up soon. The last version we had was awful with a tiny edit box for comments and stuff. Also there's hundreds of pics but I don't think you could see most of them before so hopefully it will be better soon.
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