Middle Earth DEM Project

[Vellum]

Hey Monks how's this going? not been around much lately but was thinking about your project.

V

[Stefano Pellegrini]

Hi monks,
I'm a designer and I decided to re-impaginate LOTR putting before all the chapter a map with the pat made in it.
To do this a designed a big map, usign "Atlans of Middle Earth".

https://www.behance.net/gallery/3249...the-Rings-book

I saw your work and is amazing, and I love it, very realistic and detailed.

I've always wanted to create an "orographic" map of Middle Eart, but I am not able, and your work could allow me to do it.

May I ask you to send me a vecctor version of your map, or a B/W version...or can you help me in some way?

THANK YOU KINDLY

Stefano

[Redrobes]

So a little bit of thread necromancy here but I have been doing a little bit of work on the MeDEM map recently.

It has been bothering me that I did not have a complete set of the files necessary to make up the final map. So I got back in touch with Monks and checked to see if he had the latest topo rasters and after a bit of searching about I think we have a set of them that maybe were not the absolute latest but were a set that was within a couple of weeks before the end.

Monks makes the terrain in Global Mapper and a number of other desktop apps (and basically does the real work...) and I take those rasters and run them through a series of my utilities until it exports the final set as Outerra tiles which then, either Monks or Cameni take in to make the Outerra files necessary to run it on that 3D viewer.

Before that final stage tho, I make up a set of 2D tiles for use with my ViewingDale and export them so that I can pan and zoom around in it.

Now at the time we halted there were a number of issues to resolve. First up was that, at the time, Outerra could not render lakes. It could only do sea. So we set all of the terrain for all of the lakes down to -ve height values to force Outerra to render sea where lakes should have been. Looked nice at the time but it means that the topo area around the lakes have steep cliffs going down the sides. Another issue was that we did not have Erebor, The Lonely Mountain in the map at all. It was marked as a placement but the terrain was flat there.

To fix the lowered topo areas for lakes meant getting a set of tiles from Monks without the artificially reduced heights but we did not find the set of them. I think the set I have was a temporary set for making up Outerra and that the parameter to raise and lower the lakes was something adjustable in Global Mapper or a similar app which Monks could have changed easily. But we discovered that the desktop apps used to make the topo tiles were not compatible any longer so the reduced height lakes had to stay.

But I wanted to put in an Erebor. So instead of going through the usual process where Monks would hand edit up some contours in Global Mapper and then export all of the tiles with the new mountain in it, I had to manually add in a mountain at the correct location using some height values garnered from somewhere.

Looking on the web people said that Mount Taranaki in New Zealand was the closest thing to it. I had come across this odd volcanic phenomenon before but didnt recognize the name. Its a real lonely mountain in the South West point of the North Island of New Zealand. So I got some real DEM values for that area and scaled up a bit of height map to the correct scale to make it fit into the MeDem map. Then by adding that in and rendering out the final map we have Erebor in place matching up with all of the other coloured up places.

Since previous I have also fixed up some of the snow lines and adjusted a few of the place names to fit better but there are many many places with small and oddly positioned names. Theres too many to fix up now and these were all placed using Global Mapper so the source files for these are hard to obtain now.

Since I have been made an admin of the guild and can do the leaflet maps of the community worlds and other large maps, I have uploaded a copy of the ViewingDale tile set to the Leaflet Slippy Map area so you can now have a look at the whole map.

So have a click on the link below and heres a couple of Erebor pictures.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/l...php?type=medem

[monks]

I used Mt Shasta in the US. But that one might be better. Looking good!

Sorry I missed the messages above. I've not been working on the Project for a few years.

I'm more involved in Tolkien Research these days- that is, the study of his works and texts.

monks

[Ilanthar]

Looks great, Red! This is such an ambitious project, it deserves to be reanimated .

[ChickPea]

This is a super cool project! Great work by everyone involved. Great to see a large version of the map hosted at the Guild too.

[Redrobes]

I thought that having a version of it on the guild would be a good idea as it doesnt really have a home any more. But without Erebor it was a bit odd so I think I had to add that in before hosting it. At least now I have a back up of this version so I can rebuild this one and make some more changes to it if need be. But I don't foresee myself doing a great deal more on it. You should check out Outerra and I am not sure if the latest version will display MeDem map on it now but that app has come a long way and I think if it were possible to import this map into it again I guess I would probably try to.

Monks is doing some superb work with his Tolkien research and has thrown up a lot of really interesting ideas - when I am able to keep up with it.

[mapmage]

*sniff* this is beautiful. Ten stars.

[PerroMuchacho]

Hello everyone!

This is my first post in this forum, so let me introduce myself a bit. I am a Polish cartographer and I work creating 3D renders of old maps, and I was recently thinking about creating a 3D render using DEM data of Middle Earth. My search online took me here, as most of the previous links I found were either dead or didn't contain any useful file.

Is there a chance this is the right please to ask for them? Any way I can get hold on those elevation files of Middle Earth?

Thanks in advance and best regards.

[Gomli]

I was also wondering if I could have access to the actual maps and layers of this project. All of it would be nice but mainly I just need the heightmap. I'm trying to make a Dwarf Fortress world and can only find much inferior ones that have problems with them and I'm not skilled enough to improve them myself. notasgoodversion.JPG