Middle Earth DEM Project

[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

[Redrobes]

If I get a few hours spare, ill lower the mask height for these mountains and try some on the Mistys and see how they look. Incidentally, do you have some average spot heights for some of these ranges. What would you say those mts at Mordor should have been, and what should the Nimrais and Mistys be as well. Quote what you want me to set them to and ill give it a go and get some 'proper' renders of them to see how they might look in a full run.

[Redrobes]

A couple of lower height mask runs. I think something between the two would be perfect. I got some spot heights off of Monks so ill set that up to be accurate to those now which is almost exactly half way between the first and this version. A full map of mountains like this would look cool.

[Redrobes]

I have been working more on the mountains of ME. Arandil, a member here and fellow medemmer has found a bunch of real mountain tiles and I have added some code to my GTS to rotate the height or flip it. By writing a script I have randomly picked a tile from his set and randomly rotated and flipped it and built up an array of the 40x40 tiles. By blending these together into one seamless expanse we hope to create a mountain range mask that we can apply to any masked in mountainous regions on the map. Its easier than trying to make the stuff by hand.

So now that I have all 1600 tiles, I thought I would share a 4x4 set of tiles blended together to make a 4096x4096 pixel mountain map. Apologies for the image being JPG but it blew the byte limit in PNG. At least this is better than the 5Gb of mountains I have on my drive now. Also, this is only 8 bit greyscale image instead of the full 16bit were using. But if you either add this to your map or use it as an extra height field in a continental map then it would be useful. Oh and this one is seamless within the 4x4 but not wrap around the edges. Anyway, hope its big enough.

Gotta try this out with the full MeDem map next then we chuck the whole thing at Outerra and see how it looks with real mountains in it.

[monks]

Something went awry with my forum notifications.

The ME-DEM project has been given kind permission by Cameni and AngryPig to post some development shots of our terrain within Outerra.


We recently moved over to an entirely new workflow in ME-DEM for building the terrain. We've been testing whether that would be feasable of itself and also testing the specifics of getting it into Outerra and how Outerra renders it with its procedural fractals at the sub 90m scale.


We got our initial terrain into Outerra which was built on our old workflow using procedural terrain generators. After viewing it from orbit and having seen the real earth data in Outerra (SRTM v4 at 90m), it was pretty obvious that it didn't stand up very well to scrutiny from high orbit.
While procedurals terrain generators are great are small scale (sub planetary- Outerra is BIIIIIG!!) terrain modelling, they don't currently have tools for creating convincing large scale structures like continental mountain ranges. So we decided to use real earth data instead...


We're currently using two methods: a more traditional manual modelling approach using real terrain from SRTM sources in Photoshop, Leveller, and World Machine and procedural tile blending of tiles from the same data. We use Global Mapper to select and export the tiles.


The manual modelling of the mountain ranges is the long term goal- but it will be longer term. the procedural approach will be handled by Robes' texturer and take care of any terrain I've not modelled manually in the meantime.


First up was Mordor. Bear in mind that in the future the texturer will be set up to incorporate user defined textures. We're still with the default Earth texture settings here.

The highest point on the terrain is at around 16,000 ft. Not sure where that is exactly...but everything looks good. We've used artistic license and extended the height of the Mordor mountains. We're probably going to roughly double the height of the mountains in Middle Earth over our previous estimates.
I used the Carpathians as the basis for Mordor- sorry to people who live there, no offence ;D. The problem with that was that they are not young mountains like say the Himalayas with all of those sharp glaciated ridges, so I had to apply ridge sharpening in World Machine. The Photoshop processing removed some of the high frequency detail from the terrain so I had to replace that procedutally while preserving the flatness of the valleys.

These are all shots of just the lower right quad of the ME-DEM terrain. I'll post some shots later with the entire map.


Valleys



Ridges




Another problem we had was creating a good transition from mountains to lowlands. This turned out to be not too difficult to solve.




continued...

monks

[monks]

One of the spooky mountains- this is really cool when you travel across the Udun crater- it's huge and very evil looking up close Just to get an idea of the scale of this, it takes about 20 minutes to travel across the crater of Udun "running" along the ground.




I added a sea of mist and took some pics- you get an almost tropical feel.


In this one the mist fills the caldera of Udun. The Morannon Gate (the location of the battle at the end of The Return of the King) is at the south at the gap in the crater. To get a sense of the scale of this, the arrow in the pic points to the summit of the tower in the previous pic just poking its head above the mist!





Here's Mt Doom
















I was playing around in World Machine with Voronoi noise and came up with the beginning of a surface for the plains of Mordor.

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

It'd be really sweet to be able to add to this plain the occasional displacements like these: http://blackheart6004.deviantart.com...hear-163303491
Terragen 2 has a workflow which can export displacements as meshes to 3Ds Max. That's one possibility, Outerra will no doubt have procedural solutions too.


monks

[ravells]

That is just jaw droppingly amazing, both in terms of beauty and in scale.

[monks]

Thanks ravells. We're gonna do a run of the whole map in the next week, I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes out!

monks