January Entry: Middle Earth

[RPMiller]

Great job, guys!

Redrobes, you should know as well as anyone, voting often starts "late", however, if "on-time", there's 31 days in January, thus it should officially end at the end of the 26th, which is tomorrow. It really depends on when the CLs post the vote to start, and that might not occur tomorrow!

GP

What are you hinting at?

[monks]

Thanks guys!
Well like Robes said, the comp has catapulted us out of some kind of map deprivation chamber. Haha
Go for it on the map suggestions. Been real busy over the w/e. But back into shape tomorrow.

monks

[ravells]

Lonely Mountain....there's gotta be a lonely mountain!

[Redrobes]

I am making a mad dash to get another working run done by close but I may be just too late. I have the new names on it but I changed the veg params to improve it a bit in the muddy plains and put some scrub in there like its supposed to but have got bogged down in veg param fixing. GP suggested that we have until midnight but heck it will just have to close on the WIP so far if not.

[Redrobes]

A few things fixed up - color corner, better names and veg etc. Phew just got it in there.

Monks I managed to fix up the veg so there was no vast fields of mud in the scrub areas top left.

### Latest WIP ###

[Steel General]

Even without Mt. Doom & the Lonely Mountain this is still a hell of a cool thing!!

[Redrobes]

I put a label for Mt Doom on it. I had to move Mordor and move Gorgororth to its proper place. But I was worried the ticker would run out to add lonley mountain. When we put up a 10K one for print it will have that extra label in there for it and probably a lot more too. The thing is that at 2K you cant read the small text but at 10 its great so I expect a lot more small text will get added. Have to see if Monks wants to model a little mountain right where the lonely one, and Doom are supposed to be

[Sigurd]

Done in:

Photoshop
Wintopo Pro
Global Mapper
Leveller
World Machine
GTS



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?

[monks]

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

[gmzme]

What's happened to http://www.me-dem.org ? It has completely disappeared!