Road Levelling

[HTUNE]

Dear Bundysoft,

Apologies if this has already been posted but couldn't seem to find anything specifically related to this after searching.

I am wondering if there is any way (via a script possibly) to auto level roads using a mask - even if this means some manual smoothing is required after. The reason I ask is that I am making an Arma 3 map that is 40960m x 40960 (using 10m detail 4096 hf) and there are going to be nearly 1600 roads to smooth/level. I have tested these in game along the way and all seems good apart from the camber/slope/smoothness. I have nearly finished the road shapefile in QGIS and can export also as images (can select different road types separately to export). After this will I align the road images in Photoshop over full size Sat image adding the appropriate width to each road type. This would leave me with a great template for a mask - I have used a mask to stitch two heightfields together and that seems to work very accurately.

Not to worry if this isn't possible and I'll use the tutorial method - possible merging a heightfield using the road mask of a 10m flat terrain so no need to switch layers in Sapphire.

Anyway thanks for creating such a fantastic program - recommended to all my friends!

Best wishes
Herrick

[Aaron]

Hi Herrick,

Sorry for the slow reply. At the moment there's no nice way to level roads in L3DT using vector paths, but it's definitely on the development roadmap, if you'll excuse the awful pun. In the mean time, I'm pretty sure that VTBuilder by Ben Discoe (et al.?) does a pretty neat job of this sort of work, and there should be no problems importing/exporting heightmap data between L3DT and VTBuilder using the BT file format.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[HTUNE]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks ever so much for your reply. In all honesty was expecting a bit fat 'No' with regards to this so really excited that this is possible using VTBuilder, and even more so that you have plans to add something like this yourself. Just a quick query in that you mentioned about the BT file format; I exported my HF using this but the file seemed to be only about 32mb compared to about 500mb as an XYZ file. It appears that VTBuilder accepts the XYZ file format too (although not tried exporting from VTB as XYZ yet). Does this mean that an XYZ file keeps more detail than a BT file and if so would it be better to use this?

Thanks again as this is potentially going to save me hundreds of hours and I will try to pop on some before and after pics once I have worked out how to match up my coordinates in VTB!

Best wishes
Herrick

[Aaron]

Hi Herrick,

XYZ is a really staggeringly inefficient format for regular heightmaps. It stores all coordinates as text rather than binary, and it also stores the X and Y coordinate of each point, which is wholly unnecessary for a regular grid* of data because the X and Y coordinates can be inferred from the ordering of data points. BT stores the height data as 32-bit binary floating point numbers, which is exactly the same precision as XYZ, but more compact. It's a great format for exchanging height data.

Best regards,
Aaron.

* If your data is not a regular grid, you may need a vector format like XYZ. But,m in that case, L3DT won't be much use because L3DT only loads heightmaps as regular grids anyhow.

[HTUNE]

Hi Aaron,

Many thanks that's very useful to know about XYZ compared to BT format. I have decided to re-export my original heightfields and redo using BT format (just loaded into VTBuilder and so much quicker to load compared to XYZ) - will only use the XYZ for the final export from L3DT to game as only accepts these or png in Visitor 3.

HF and shapefile aligned now and just finding out about next stage for experimentation!

Thanks again,
Herrick

[schultzit]

Are there any updates on this?

I've been using VTBuilder but I'm kinda stuck after importing my terrain and roads network, so looking forward for a L3DT solution!

[Aaron]

Hi schultzit,

I'm sorry, I don't have anything new to add at the moment. However, once I've released the next version (soon!), I should be free to look at some nice new features like supporting road networks.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[schultzit]

Very cool, thanks for your reply!