Assignment 3 Work - New Heightmap

It was clear from the previous assignment that the Heightmap exhibited signs of possible exaggerated variance between some areas. The glaring example of this was the problems I had when trying to fine tune the river.



Which didn't quite line up with the reference images which suggest a more subtle fall to the land on both sides indicating that the height of each bank area is a similar height.




To look into this I went back to the original SRTM dataset and noticed something interesting. The terrain was clearly a lot flatter than the original height map seemed to demonstrate. With this knowledge I went back to Angel Island demonstration videos on Crymod and decided that the grey scale spread needed to be reduced. It seems that the original hightmap generated was using an elevation range of purely the cropped areas height range. This meant that it was dealing with a smaller range of heights, yet still mapping approximately 256 colours resulting in a more "detailed" but out of scale height map.

To fix this I regenerated the map but this time using the entire DEM's range which is usually up to around 290 meters. This resulted in a much flatter, but more ultimately more realistic terrain than before.

New Heightmap:


Previous HeightMap:


Result:

The resulting map didn't have to be tweaked an awful lot to add the water relatively accurately. The landscape only needed to be dropped or raised an average of 2m around the site of the water bodies for it to look similar to the reference images.

No more scary cliffs!

Assignment 3 Work - Adding Vegetation

Assignment 3 Work - Adding AI

Specialisation - Advanced Terrain (Posted to wiki)

I've posted my specialisation tutorial to the class wiki which outlines how to use existing data sources of real world locations to create terrain.

Originally I felt this would be a Beginner / Medium level tutorial, however I think due to the length and ability to adapt to custom application sets by focusing more on the concepts of each step I feel it is more a Medium/Advanced level tutorial.

I hope someone finds this useful in the future.

Big thanks to Zapwizard and 4k1r4 over at crymod for posting some pretty awesome tutorials which I used as the basis for this one.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/idujvmwm4xd/Advanced+Terrain.pdf

Assignment Two

Final Crysis environment
http://files.filefront.com/13720477

Video One

Video Two

IMAGES

Real world data. (SRTM Heightmaps)

One of the major shortcomings with the draft environment was the reliance on approximate eyeballing for the terrain modelling. In a architecture where millimeter accuracy is king these kind of approximations are just fundamentally blasphemous, especially, when there are alternatives. Enter SandBox2s height mapping capability. first established in GIS applications and a well worn concept in other gaming engines, Sandbox2 allows you use a pixel per unit greyscale bitmap to act as the reference for height data. An accurate enough heightmap can produce pretty stunning results.

After searching the moding forums I came across two old threads and a link to another outside forum each detailing methods for creating accurate heightmaps. Originally I thought I would be creating one from the contours I generated in sketchup previously, however I found there was a much better way for achieving the same result.

4K1R4’s tutorial on CryMod (http://crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=17539) Shows the method of using Google Earth, Google Sketchup and 3Dem (a GIS modelling program) to create heightmaps. Unfortunately the video tutorial is no longer in existence and 4K1R4 is no long and active member and has not responded to my request to re-post the tutorial, but reading through the thread I was able to glean some insight into how the process worked.

From what I can gather the preliminary stages are similar to those for making a 1:1 texture map of your area. First you bring your area into SketchUp from Google Earth, place a 2048 x 2048 square around the data you wish to map. Then, placing that square back into Google Earth as a reference, you can find the real world co-ordinates for each corner of your site.

Once those co-ordinates have been found you can download SRTM data from a source and the create a greyscale BMP for the area you need.

The best workflow I found was on the Transport Tycoon forums where MGSteve has posted a pretty comprehensive tutorial (http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=27052) of how you can use a google earth add on to quickly download data for the area you need rather than trawl through the cryptic ftp sites that usually host such data. This approach uses a program called MicroDem for the data manipulation and is the one I used for my tests.

This first image shows the google earth plugin in action, once you’ve found the data set you need, you can download it and open it in MicroDEM.

This image shows the data set loaded in MicroDem.

The resulting greyscale bitmap for the Hyde Park area.

And the results in our map.

Unfortunately after several attempts, I am still unable to create a working heightmap, however I will keep trying some alternate methods.

Assignment One - Strengths and Weaknesses