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[mark]

Hi,
Congrats on your success with Outerra; the new stuff looks great.  Believe it or not, I have been following your progress on/off for almost 7 years.  I finally got inspired to do a similar project for another non-tolkien realm.  It looks like the tools you are using have come a long way. I recall the old site having a lot of useful material on the painstaking process of creating the terrain with a mix of l3dt, world machine, probably Wilbur, and I am sure some others.  I found the old defunct forums, and much of this data is still there, but the bulk of it is 5-7 years old.  This discovery prompted a few questions:
Can you please lay out what the current work flow looks like, still the same?
Is most of the rough forming done, and now you are just polishing?  Or are you still creating new land? 
Are you actually using real DEM data, or is it just for reference? 
If so, how do you stitch it?
If you were starting from scratch, how would you do it? 
I have Wilbur, CS6 and L3DT Pro.  Any others?
I understand that Outerra can handle a range of terrain grid spacing.  is there a sweetspot?  What are you using?  I think i recall your project being 40k x 40k.  Am i correct?
thanks!!

[Redrobes]

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.

[mark]

ok, thanks.  I looked at Global Mapper; so it is basically a GIS program?  So you go in, select some mountains you like, export, cut and paste into a heightmap?  That actually sounds incredibly complicated to pull off, getting things to align and such. This is where I envisioned photoshop being useful, but I imagine it is probably easier in a terrain painting program.  Well I have been toying with L3DT, and although i can imagine it being useful for quickly generating a 2048x2048 map for a shooter like unreal, I am not finding it useful to create a unique, realistic, hand-crafted look in large scale.  Interested to hear what Monks has to say.

[mark]

Well I did some digging into the old forums, as well as the new Outerra ones.  So i guess it looks like the first couple years of the project were putting together a rough 40kx40k hand-crafted heightmap using various products like leveller, world builder, etc.  Then the team began focusing on Outerra, and it was determined that the existing height data was not realistic enough.  Monks has a quote about his current workflow, talking about how he uses DEM info to select mountains and other features, and uses Photoshop, and predominantly the warp tool, to process the data., then stitches the tiles together in Leveller.  I have Global Mapper now, and I am learning how to use it.  So basically I have the ASTER 30m worldwide DEM data.  I identify a mountain or something I like, export the tile, lasso the feature, and copy/paste the data onto a base photoshop map.  This map has a certain grayscale set to sealevel, a coastline, and maybe some noise.  Once the features are added, I use either photoshop or Wilbur to correct the screwed up areas, run some erosion filters, add some noise.  I guess this all makes sense, though a concise tutorial would certainly be welcome.  A few places I am still fuzzy on are how coastline features are created, how heights are managed given the various sources of terrain info, how the terrain textures are sourced, and how the data is managed and stored, amongst others.  I hope this project once again generates some discourse, because  basically I have found nowhere on the web  where people are attempting to hand-craft realistic terrain in large scale.

[mark]

Ok, so i played some more and have run into different problems.  I am attempting to make a 20k x 20k heightmap, and I figure using the Aster worldwide V2 DEMs at 30m resolution, I will be able to make a neat 600km world.  I really want to use 30m spacing instead of 90m for my source data, and this is the only worldwide coverage I have found that is free at this resolution (am I right)?  So I think I have found that this data isn't streamable into Global Mapper, and the most usable site I have found for downloading the data is the LPDAAC site.  Unfortunately, their map browser is low resolution, and I have found that it isn't useful for identifying terrain I want to copy, paste, and splice together.  Also, only 20 one-degree tiles can be downloaded at a time.  Anyone have any advice?
 

[monks]

Hi Mark, not been open here for a spell as I've been busy with a game project for a studio.
 Yeh I really should put up a major tutorial at some point, but that'll certainly have to be after we put the textured map into Outerra, which itself is waiting until I finish up on this other project.....
 I downloaded all of the tiles one at a time :-D...yep it's a pain in the arse, but at least you get the files you want. But 30m means potentially 9 times as many,...ouch!
 I'd say the following are an absolute must: Global Mapper, World Machine 2 pro, and Photoshop- CS5 onwards is preferable for the content aware fill feature.
 What I did for V1.0 is to combine the base dem + mountains + a large dem of the US inside World Machine. The latter was a filler dem to fill in everwhere else. Quick and dirty but it was ok for V1.0. You mask out where you don't want the filler dem to be.
 I think WM pro has enough features now for you to be able to avoid using Global Mapper IF you have Photoshop. Try and work with 20K tiles if you can but I often found I had to go through Wilbur to "normalise" the terrain- GM can add some heights at the borders which are unreadable for wM. But GM is the only place to be if you want GIS data.
 Coastlines are crinkled using Wilbur. Add a bit of noise, percentage noise say 0.3% or something- it's in the Wilbur tuts actually, then precipiton say 6 times, then incise flows once. Incise flows can be undone so you can try a few settigns out. The Wilbut tuts suggest using basin fills- that doesn't work for me as it tends to interfere with the hydrology I've got (very basic tbh). A few runs of each usually. You just gotta be careful not to change the coastlines too much- depending on if you're working to a ref map. You gotta run that on the terrain as a single piece and so you are limited to doing that at about 16K res in the current Wilbur. It takes soem time as well. A whole day since you can't script it so you have to keep running each process sequentially. I think the results can be really cool though.

 I don't stitch any tiles in Leveller. I only do that in Global Mapper (tricky but doable if you keep tile numbers down) and WM. In fact I've not used it yet but I'm pretty sure the latest WM preserves the GIS data coming in/out, so you won't need to manually rectify in GM too often anymore. I always use hfz format when I can. I'm not sure if this is included in the GIS support. You'll have to check that out on the WM boards. Let us know over here as I'm not sure myself!
 
 Get a grip on how to georef data coming into GM. Define your world extents carefully and everything should be good from there. You should can get the georeffing data- such as any quadrant/area extents you set up. Use them to rectify on import. I think you can find that in right click on layer in the Control panel-or at the bottom of control panel. One thing to remember is that GM only exports or processes visible layers. The GM yahoo mailing list is always really helpful.
 Using a base dem is very useful. That can be defined pretty easily anywhere you like really. Always take into account though that you'll be adding to it- but respaning can be straightforward enough in WM.
 
 Seriously, thinking back on all of this workflow, it's crazy really, and I'm a bit out of touch with it at the moment!

 Hope this helps!

monks

[mark]

Thanks so much for the reply.  Looks like I have to acquire a few more tools and carefully parse through your response. luckily my terrain will be 1/4 the area yours is.  Its also an island, so that helps.  I think I can probably get most of the dem data I need by downloading a couple of carefully selected mountain ranges and island chains.   Cool that you are working on a game project... is your work terrain based?  Anything as neat as middle earth? Confidentiality notwithstanding.