Middle Earth DEM Project

[monks]

Beauties! Check your mail.

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

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]

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