Middle Earth DEM Project

[guyanonymous]

OK. This sounds very interesting.

[monks]

:-D Hi guy. Yes, the anti alias needs sorting out but MineCraft has a bit more of an issue with that hehe.

If you're ever looking for a crazy project to get involved in, this is it! 6 years and counting for me...

monks

[monks]

River tests. I ran the terrain through Wilbur using the precipiton and incise flows. I'm not using basin fill here.
The pics show the terrain in World Machine with some erosion added in there. Apart from some of the results we've had with GTS, these are the best rivers we've had to date.
Note, the terrain here was processed without any fractal detail added.This is as about as basic in appearance as the terrain gets. I added 2 or 3% noise in Wilbur.






http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests5.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests5a.png


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests6.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests6a.png

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iverTests7.png

with coastline
http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...verTests7a.png




monks

[Redrobes]

I grabbed another few hours tonight and coded the linear interpolation. Its slowed down the data file generation by a bit since its requesting 4x as many coordinates from the terrain but, as expected, its solved the 'dodgy normals' problems. So from a bit of a distance this looks well cool. This is with the 10K map tho so next step is to try the 40K one... Mmmmm.

EDIT -- thought id render a similar view to last time just to be sure it really is working. That looks much better now.

[monks]

This looks awesome!! I can't wait to fly around it. :-D
Yes, I can see the difference now with the normals. I think once we get our data in place with the Earth data we should use this as the new website front page image.

One can only imagine what this will look like fully eroded and textured...o_O


monks

[Ascension]

Lookin' great, guys. One of these days you'll have it all done and can relax.

[monks]

Thanks Ascension.. I did take about 18 months of a break from this but then some very irresponsible person posted a map in the ME-DEM forums and started it all up again haha! I had a hard disk crash and lost some work, and I was busy with with my band. A week of pain redoing the work got the ball rolling again. Things have moved in leaps and bounds since then. Finally got the rivers to where I want them and the terrain is wicked in ProLand. We're hoping to get it into another planet renderer some time this year which has trees and ocean rendering. *We hope*.


monks

[ravells]

I hope so too, this is just looking flipping gorgeous!

[monks]

Thanks Ravells, things are really starting to take shape!

Got some good news. RedRobes and I were asked by the guys at OuTerra if they could use our data to test their new map compression software and beta test their planetary rendering engine and sandbox world editor. The ProLand demo is *amazing*, but we'll be able to do a lot more in OuTerra. In the sandbox editor we'll be able able to build features, import our distribution maps from Global Mapper for stuff like roads, forests, etc, and have ocean rendering.

OuTerra
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeoT_cz2nC0

For more info visit:
http://outerra.blogspot.com/

Exciting times indeed!

monks

[monks]

I've got the Anduin flowing. So far I've done about a quarter of the total
area I wanted to look at. It is quite a big job this one.



You can see the original rivers in Global Mapper (from the topo) vs the eroded river valleys
It's not prefect but I'd be happy to run with those.

There's just one point where the main course stops flowing. It's
ridiculously close- something like a few pixels where it's interrupted.
But it continues immediately afterwards. I've not included all of the
watershed at the top in this run, so the flow may be a little more,
so that might solve it,, if Wilbur erosion works at all like that.

As long as we can output the new rivers as masks in Wilbur, we shouldn't
have problems. Joe said we have a few options, so I'm optimisitc about that.

There's a little bit too much incise erosion on the east bank for me- should
be smoother, but that's a minor quibble. I'd blur that area and add gently rolling hill
noise anyway. Tolkien does describe that vista.

Back to it!

monks