Middle Earth DEM Project

[Redrobes]

I run a savage firewall but I also don't run antivirus. They seem to hand control of your machine over to some 3rd party censor list which you have to trust as much as the files your downloading. They also seem to hose your performance esp when saving and loading from the HDD. I am pretty careful about what I download too and I monitor the processes that are running on my PC fairly well. Its possible that there's stuff running taking barely any CPU and being very well hidden but I am somewhat confident that at the mo there is not.

An antivirus which says that if it doesn't know about something is automatically suspicious is just plain bonkers. For me as a coder I could not write anything under that kind of restriction. I want an antivirus that at most will only flag stuff it knows to be bad. This is just like airport security and the clogging of the people flow through their barriers and has about as much impact on real security too noting the Brinks diamond heist this week which bypassed all security there and had people access a plane baggage hold. Its no difference with files on the drive in this case.

[mearrin69]

I've drawn up a quick list of sites that need modelling. The obvious ones from the books. There's also lots of other useful things that could be modelled too- such as "generic" buildings such as dwellings, towers, forts, roads/tracks, sign posts, milestones, etc.

Sorry if I've missed it: Is there a site devoted to this project or is this thread it? Where would you likely post your list of things you want modeled, tech specs, etc.? Where would you want finished models posted?

I get that you guys aren't 100% ready to answer all of these questions yet but figured I'd bring some of them up. I might do some digging for refs when I have some free time and have a go at modeling some basic stuff. I presume this is late Third Age M.E. as of the start of the LotR trilogy...Shire still intact, Barad Dur still standing, etc.?
M

[Redrobes]

Monks drew up a nice list of places that we need to model.... and then kept it hidden on his PC !!!! LOL

No - the news is that were right now putting a new forum together. The MeDem site has traditionally existed as me-dem.org but we spun off a new site me-dem.me.uk because we didnt have any proper admin rights to the other one and we now host the main galleries on that but up to now we didnt have a proper forum on the new site - it linked to the old forum.

The thing is that the old forum has had a lot of issues and basically its almost impossible to register for it. It has the medem news of 2005 on the front page of it still.... So Cameni has proposed that he will make a new forum as a spin off of outerra and have all the worlds on there that people can model and populate for outerra - our MeDem being the only one at the mo other than earth. Not sure if he is proposing to have earth on this new site or leave that for the main outerra forum.

Anyways. were just dotting some T's and crossing some I's and setting it up so we can have a place where people can actually register and get a log in and we can host a list and start to work on some models in a more coordinated way than were currently doing.

So maybe tomorrow or day after we will post a new URL so that we can get ourselves organized and have lots of threads for each place / model instead of cluttering up this forum or the outerra main forum. Tho I am sure we would post milestones, some pics and news to both here and the main outerra forum too. Heck - maybe we would even post some real news to the old medem forum and break a habit of a lifetime

[mearrin69]

I've been ogling Fonstad's book forever. Maybe it's time to get it. Looking forward to your site.
M

[Korash]

WOOOOT!!!

It actually worked I had to turn off the antivirus for it to hang around long enough to install, but it is now DONE Psyched and as happy as Bilbo in his own comfy bed.

[Redrobes]

Cool ! Let us know what you think and what bits of it could be improved. We had to do some crazy stuff with the terrain height around lakes to turn them into mini seas because at this point Outerra doesnt support lakes so the lake borders are a bit blocky. And biomes will come into play at some point so we can do some more there too. There is no Rivendell or some other fairly important features but the basic land form is there and running so its a start.

That new forum seems to be live and working now so I can direct you to:

Outerra Worlds Forums - Index

and you can start some posts in there about the locations you might like to make into 3D. Monks will put in that list at some point. Im not sure at this point what capability we have for importing the models yet but if they are compatible with blender / sketchup then I think they should be ok for the future.

[monks]

I'm not getting updates on this thread so apologies for not seeing this

NEW FORUMS
Outerra Worlds Forums - Index

Off the top of my head:-

roads! Great East road. Great north rd.
Isengard- think we can buy that cheap.
Weathertop ruins.
Argonath
Bree
Doors of Moria. Although that would need a lake.
Rivendell- needs a valley
Hobbiton, or a hobbit hole
Green Dragon at Bywater
Woody End
Last Bridge- that needs a river.
Tom Bombadil's House
barrow downs - ie, tumuli
Edoras
Helm's Deep
Minas Tirith
minas Ithil
Erech Stone
Moria...haha,..yeh right...
Durin's Stair
Caras Galedhon in Lorien
Wellinghall Treebeard's home.
Dol Guldur (dependent on time setting)
Pelennor
Osgiliath
Minas Morgul
amon hen, amon lhaw- near Rauros where Frodo flees Boromir
Morannon Gate
Barad Dur
The Carrock where Beorn lives
Lake Town- needs lake
Dale
Carn Dum
Thranduil's realm in Mirkwood.
Annuminas ruins
site of the Troll camp in the Hobbit.

...so not many then :_D


Woohoo Korash!

Way to go mearrin. Fonstad is a really good source. I'll list a few refs for people..but folks can add to them.
Time setting is not sooo important if people want to see a place then why not?, but yes T.A. annuminas ruins tell you T.A , but if someone wanted to model the old city, then go ahead.

monks

[monks]

Just started a 10 week course in 3DS Max and picked up a copy. Wow,...monster program. So, the long learning process of modelling with meshes starts here!

monks

[jezelf]

Hello

Had a look at the project on Outerra yesterday - amazing job folks! - I've been following your project on and off with excited anticipation, stumbled on the Outerra and I saw your contribution - great job!!! - it does look magnifcent so far, if you've got more to add with routes and buildings and such, it's going to be spectacular when complete...Im sooooo tempted to make Weathertop ruins for ya, but just don't know if I can commit just yet.

Out of curiosity - what would the specs be? tri count, # of textures @ what res? - looking at the Outerra files, looks like Diffuse and Normal textures (no specular?) @ 1024 for tiled ground textures. what texel density are you looking at? I assume you need 3 LODs as well.

I wanted to show your work off today, demo won't load and tells me it's looking for updates. I updated my drivers yesterday so, I'll need to look into it - anyway, I was instantly wanting to know - how do I get my own map in there? I read the overview in an earlier post, sounded a lot more steps than I expected. I had been making a world in Fractal Terrians, at first I was curious if I could churn out tiles and it just drop in , but I see it's a lot more complex.

I've used World Machine and Wilbur, so the arty side is still within reach for me, but sounds like theres a load more things to consider.

Do you have a tutorial or workflow you can show? I'll love to find out. Im guessing at this point it'll be a few years before there's a chance for me to get to see something like a user friendly importer implimented into Outerra? (I'd ask this on their forum, but I'm waiting for my registration to be approved)

anyway - thanks for all your hard work! it's truely very inspiring and I look forward to seeing more....and getting back there and flying about as if Im on - I dunno, - a giant eagle ?

cheers
jez

[Redrobes]

Hi Jez, we basically have a base height map which is 40K x 40K. Thats made from global mapper by Monks and he takes it into a few apps - I am not exactly sure what the secret sauce is but you can ask him. I know world machine and wilbur are part of it tho. We eventually get out a load of height map tiles and thats fed into my GTS. That doesnt change the height map values at the mo but it does generate a load of texture stuff for us. Now Outerra doesnt use a texture map - only a vegetation bias map so we generate that for them. For the viewingdale map we generate loads of textures and make up the full colour one in 2D. But for outerra the guys over there have allowed us to use some tool which converts height maps and the vegetation map into the final outerra format. That thing uses the graphics card with loads of processing and my card isnt powerful enough to run it (its missing some required extension or something). So monks does that bit as well.

Outerra doesnt do specular and diffuse as such but it generates all of the terrain procedurally from the base tile packed info so its shaders are built in to the app. I see some guys on the forums modding the shader textures so they must be configurable somehow but we dont do that. I think the free demo app doesnt have model import and shader adjustment stuff. At the mo outerra isnt supporting configurable biomes so your stuck with temperate plains / woodland until we get that then I think we will need extra textures to program the biome across the terrain. Since me-dem have had that info for a long while were just waiting for them and it will look great when they get that bit coded up.

Your probably going to need Cameni's help getting a map into outerra but he is a very helpful chap so you need to ask Cameni if the Outerra Mapressor is available to use by anyone and monks about how we run it in me-dem from a tile set. What I can tell you that you would need is lots of tiles of terrain height maps in HF2 or HFZ format but I am not sure how the mapressor knows how many to use and the layout for them.

And yes your right we use 1024 sized tiles and there are no LODs - mapressor does the LOD generation via a fractal / wavelet generator which is how its so good when its zoomed right up close. I dont think each individual stage is all that complicated but the management of them all is a burden with so many tiles. That management is what I do with the makefiles. It used to take 10 days to run the makefile from the point where monks has generated the height maps. Were down to 3 days now with the faster CPUs tho. But don't think by any stretch that you can do it manually one at a time. You will need to write a batch processing script of some sort. 40K is 40 tiles square so thats 1600 tiles to process. I think mapressor uses 5K tiles tho as input.

And yes - importing a giant eagle would make a nice change from the ole Cesna or Apache ! Very nice idea !!!