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16

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap [for Minecraft]?

« on: January 31, 2014, 05:25:14 pm »

Yes, try MeshLab its very good at handling large models. Also, if these files are so big then its likely that they are objects made up of loads of cubes which is not ideal. However you can just take the overall point cloud from all the cubes and mesh out a skin over it. See if you can zip an OBJ file on the forum and lets see what it looks like. Blender will also load in obj files no probs. Theres also 3DExplorer and Wings3D will also do it.

17

General Discussion / Re: Introduce Yourself!

« on: January 31, 2014, 12:14:34 am »

Hi guys & welcome,

Yeah I think the 3D modelling is the thing that were most lacking. The terrain side is well tedious and involves a lot of memory, harddrive, set up etc but the 3D modelling side we would like to get some places modeled.

I dont think they need to be at all fine detail. I think right now we would settle for some boxes and cones and stuff just marking out the size and scale of the places. The scaling does need to be right tho so anyone with a keen interest in the books is more valuable right now than great 3D skills. Enthusiasm and perseverance are the killer traits for medem because it does get a bit tedious at times and we make no progress for months before getting a surge and new demo material out.

18

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap [for Minecraft]?

« on: January 31, 2014, 12:06:31 am »

Wow there is a lot to take in on this thread. I have seen Minecraft had some Tolkien stuff but not really gone into it to find out much. The low res of Minecraft is a serious impediment to making a good map but on the other hand its a huge benefit to making buildings. Being just so ridiculously easy to build things is such a low barrier to entry for anyone to get involved. I think thats our problem with the requirement of Outerra in the 3D department. It needs Collada format files but sketchup and OBJ could be converted no probs. Blender would be fine I am not sure about the other one mentioned as I had not come across it before.

Regarding scaling of the height in Minecraft, what kind of sampling did you use. It sounds like you used nearest neighbor or pixel sampling in which case you would loose a lot of detail. Tho you must loose some, if you used a more intelligent sampling algorithm like say Lanczos then you would probably not have noticed it quite so much. But fundamentally having only 255 height values is a problem.

Im gonna have to chew on these posts a bit more. Interesting stuff - thanks for posting them. I am wondering if it is at all possible to get the minecraft data and then strip off the buildings and see if they can be of any use whatsoever. I don't think so but its a thought just rumbling around my heat at the mo. I really like some of the interpretations esp Barad Dur.

19

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap?

« on: January 27, 2014, 04:46:51 pm »

PNG is lossless so for 8 bit should be fine. There is a 16bit PNG but implementation stability varies. Personally I think a PNG or BMP per tile would be fine but I dont think many apps would handle 40Kx40K images. Generally I believe paint shop pro would be ok up to about 16K then it gets problematic. Ideally you need a 64 bit app and run a 64bit version of windows. Even then tho the image file formats are not geared up for very large image sizes. TIFF is probably the best in that regard but TIFF has lots of issues which is why we dont use them. Its a good idea to stick with tiles and page them in as required.

20

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap?

« on: January 25, 2014, 02:34:05 pm »

If your able to do that Monks then that would be useful. The way I would have to do it is to render out all of the 1600 tiles then resample them to 350 pixel tiles then blend them all back into a 10K square PNG. It could be done but for one thing I dont have the latest height tiles tho I think mine are probably good enough. But its a lot of work to generate them.
If we put a lot of effort into it then it would be possible to generate the map and export the height and water tables out to 8 bit with the colour map for minecraft. We could do the volcanic and trees and water bodies as well. Potentially we could make a MeDem in minecraft but I haven't used that app yet. Just seen my young cousins playing around on it thats all. Personally whilst there isa free Outerra demo for MeDem which also fills in the sub 100m level with procedural fractal landscape and sorts out the 3D terrain generation then there is no point in looking around at any other terrain visualization tool.

I dont think Monks covered that last bit tho. We have a final map of 40K x 40K height points and colour pixels. Its generated off of an export of contour maps at a 10K res. We also input some more hand made or script made data at 10K for some parameters like forced vegetation and temperature maps etc so that the terrain generation tool gets the right sort of output terrain for the area being generated. We export for ViewingDale as a 2D set of maps, geomapper set of map layers for a "google maps" type thing that someone does for us and then also Outerra.

Anyways - I hope Monks can export something. I expect that you will discover that most of the terrain will consist of very low value heights and that the blocking will be quite large. But then that's what Minecraft looks like so maybe thats ok.

21

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap?

« on: January 24, 2014, 09:13:10 pm »

I dont think we have a greyscale bitmap of the heights only. I think we would need to write a script to generate them if we needed it. We have only got HF2 type. We have a black and white only mask of the land sea at 10K res which is a good start. And we have a black and white mask of the hilly ground at same res and we have a mountain mask as well so we have a two bit solution... Those are in the preprocess 10240 section of the main map files and the Tiles Level_0_10240 section. Not bad for Minecraft tho -maybe

22

General Discussion / Re: 8 bit Heightmap?

« on: January 24, 2014, 03:38:00 pm »

I thought middle earth was done in mine craft. I saw the Hobbiton and Bree on some forum somewhere. You can check out the galleries I am not sure we have an 8 bit version anywhere. All of the stuff we use is float based height. I am not sure that 256 levels would adequately encode a terrain height. If you had a mountain 25600 ft tall then your res would be 100ft per value.

23

General Discussion / Re: Help Wanted?

« on: January 21, 2014, 10:33:48 am »

Hi there Morcrist,

I think the terrain stuff is too involved for most people to manage and its also a huge headache to have gigabytes of the terrain data spread out over many machines. But what we are looking for is some 3D models of interesting places in Middle Earth. There is a list of the places that we would like to make up - link at the end.

What would be really really useful right now is a model of each one of those in extremely rough detail. I.e. just boxes, cones, cylinders and whatever else is really easy to knock up in a few minutes. But that these models should just be about the right scale and take up an approximately right amount of area on the map.

We should be able to import them into outerra and fly around and see a spike where Isengard would be for example.

What Monks and I need to do a bit later is refine the terrain around those places to make sure that the models fit onto that base correctly before we put a more refined 3D building on top.

So the only challenge to that job is that you might need to investigate the shapes of those places by using the book descriptions, or taking notes from artwork produced over the years by people or by referencing the existing or accepted consensus of the worlds opinion on what the book said was there.

Whilst the recent films are one such source to look at, it was only one interpretation and tho a reasonably good one for many of the places (at least I thought so....) the books should be the final arbiter. Thats why I think we need the rough models so people can point out the references before too much effort has gone into them if they need to be adjusted.

For the 3D format then I like OBJ since its all text and thus very portable but outerra is using a COLLADA variant format I believe so google sketchup files should be compatible with them. I am sure SKU are just zipped COLLADA format. But if you want to run with some specific format other than those then so long as its convertible then I think it should be fine. Using Blender should mean that you can convert any model to its list of exports and OBJ and COLLADA are amongst them.

Hope that helps. I think both Monks and I are about 3 - 4 weeks away from being freed up enough to do a beta rerun of the biomes again and then were on to the building areas.

P.S. Place list is here:
http://worlds.outercraft.com/forum/index.php/topic,7.msg11.html#msg11

Just create a thread per new model place and people can comment or pick up the baton and refine it a bit more.

24

3D Model Places / Re: Place List

« on: December 17, 2013, 01:45:50 pm »

Thanks thats good information. I havent tried to port any 3D object into Outerra yet but maybe one day ill have a go. My 3D modeller is also 64K point limited so I would not expect it to be able to handle more than this anyway.

25

General Discussion / Re: Outerra Biome Update

« on: December 16, 2013, 06:16:10 pm »

Yes I think we need to get this fixed ASAP even if were not using the absolute latest version of our sim biome data to import. Just something approx for the time being to keep it running will be ok.

26

General Discussion / Re: DEM for climate model

« on: December 06, 2013, 02:46:54 pm »

Hi Dan,

Thats very cool. Sorry we were not able to provide some base DEM data for you but you seem to have generated some which provides some answers which make the world quite plausible. I dont think Tolkien himself worried about the realism to a great extent but its fun to see how it might play out in such a simulation.

From our point of view it may generate some items of interest that we could possibly incorporate into the MeDem map but mainly ours is generated from the simulation we run with a lot of user generated input such as the baseline temperature map. So if you have generated an objective model from no user input then that's quite a feat. That climate model must be quite complex.

Were still hoping to push out a new MeDem version of the map to the Outerra engine with its new base texture feature and programmable biome texturing thing it has now. So ill be sure to post about that in due course when Monks gets more free time from his commercial terrain thing he is tied up on.

I will have a more thorough look at the PDF but for now ill just say I always knew Texas was somewhere in Mordor....



EDIT: Chaps at the www.cartographersguild.com would be real interested in that PDF. Its right up their street !

27

General Discussion / Re: Road map

« on: November 01, 2013, 12:50:38 am »

Just posting here to say that now Outerra is announcing some limited biome support, we will be using our existing biome data and formatting it up into Outerra compatible form so that it will use it.

28

General Discussion / Re: Monks - terrain-making guidance? THX

« on: November 01, 2013, 12:46:56 am »

Hi there, You really need Monks but he is tied up on a project at the mo and I hope he can comment more. He builds the terrain and I write the process script to turn it into Outerra compatible data. I can tell you that we use hand crafted terrain for most of the map except that we use real mountain dems to height texture up the mountains since its still the case that no artificial program can seem to generate realistic mountains that hold up in Outerras close scrutiny. I am not sure how Monks stitches it but I recall that we mainly use Global Mapper and some Wilbur for the rivers and basins. I dont believe that we use photoshop in any part of the process and tho I am familiar with l3dt its not part of the process at all. We are indeed using a 40Kx40K array.

The terrain forming is a bit on hold for a while. Now that Outerra has some biome support I think we will get that into the app esp since we have that data as part of our system which is discarded for outerra. We use it to generate the coloured maps. It will be super excellent to see this data used in Outerra because it will greatly enhance the realism.

29

General Discussion / Re: DEM for climate model

« on: November 01, 2013, 12:37:41 am »

Hi Dan, I run the build process for the final stages of the map and terrain generation. For this we use a simulation which I wrote called GeoTerSys which sorta stood for Geomorphological Terrain System. What it does it basically calculates the temperature, rainfall, evaporation and so on for the terrain and works out how that might affect the river flow and the vegetation for the land. Then we export those parameters into greyscale maps which are then fed into the programmable texture generator so that it can render out the final maps. Outerra doesnt use many of these but it is now using the vegetation map. Outerra has recently posted that its now doing some simple biome information so in the near future we will be using more of those maps to import information into Outerra's biome system to render the vegetation as well as land colour and so on.

We use a map of 40K x 40K pixels. Each pixel knows about the liquid content (rain, river, snow) and the temperature, vegeation as well as the height. Plus it has a number of other parameters all tied up in that pixel. We run a very simplified terrain and climate model since we have limited CPU power. At the mo it takes about 15 mins per tile and we have 1600 tiles so it takes a long time. The app is written so that it could in theory be done in parallel tho. But even so we have to manage the overlap of the tiles and ensure that data leaks off of one tile into the next adjacent one. So its not a simple process.

We could provide some kind of DEM for it. Monks usually handles that aspect of it and I think we can generate some kind of lower res version which is not so bandwidth heavy but right now he is a bit tied up with some other work. We do have above and below sea level heights for the map but you must understand that our map is but one interpretation of JRRT's map. We have tried to ensure that it is hydrologically correct tho even if the map is not one which is super accurate to any physical model when he sketched it.

Now I am not sure what a res of 720 x 360 points means. That seems so completely ridiculously low res to do any meaningful work with.  The map we use is 4000km square so your res would mean something like 5km per pixel. We originally aimed for 25m per pixel but were at 100m at the mo. Even 1km per pixel is quite low res tho.

Anyway - I have rambled enough.... your thoughts ?

30

3D Model Places / Re: Place List

« on: June 26, 2013, 11:28:11 am »

This is all interesting stuff. With Orthanc a good discussion is probably needed and then either we get to some consensus or we produce a model per consensus group and you pick one. Personally I think it needs to be more than a totally natural spire. If a powerful wizard were to live in it then it would have been hollowed out inside which makes it likely that they would have fashioned the outside to some extent too. It may have started out as a natural feature tho.

I don't think were going to be able to get Outerra to phase through timelines of models so I think we have to get people to install the models they like from a collection / data base. Outerra's capabilities are not up to us MeDem-ers and I would imagine that a timeline feature would be extremely low on the feature priority for them.

What we really need is a wiki for the book references. However, whilst setting up a wiki is not a huge problem, allowing all members to edit it and yet at the same time only allow non certified knob ends to edit it is the problem. Its a huge moderation issue that you need an army of moderator bots and / or lots of willing volunteers to accomplish. So I think a wiki is out and that we have to do this by threads on this forums.

It would be good to have a map where we can do links to the threads of the place options being discussed / worked on. Ideally we could do with a rough 3D template model for every place and then more detailed versions could be picked up and worked on. The template should just set out the generally size and shape so we could fix up the base terrain so that when a high res model comes into being it has a place to sit on that makes it fit.

And yeah, I am also somewhat tied up at the mo and for some time I expect. I think we will get some discussion done over this week / next week reviewing what we have done and where its going. But we have had some long periods where not a lot gets done then it kicks off again for another bout of activity. We have likened this to climbing up some sheer face where we reach a plateau and have a push to get there then a long rest before setting off for the next one. My personal want for the next stage is for when Outerra gets programmable biomes since we have a lot of stuff done in that respect waiting for the 3D engine to make use of it. But Outerra can already do 3D models so its just up to any of us to make it and they could go in right now. I would like to see rough untextured models going in many places first before seeing one highly detailed model but I think we would take whatever we can get. But if I am going to do some modelling then I would start knocking out the rough ones and let people pick them up and improve them.