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Editing Height Maps

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Editing Height Maps

Postby Ionus » Tue Aug 16, 2016 9:56 am

Hi,

I have maps from SRTM of Britain. I imported them individually and changed them over to L3Dt native format for saving. Then using Import > Merge Heightmaps, I stitched them together. As the shape of Britain and Ireland is not square, and SRTM breaks the world into some rather unorthodox areas, this resulted in maps that produced an upside down "T" shape. The arms of the upside down "T" included areas of The North Atlantic and France. I cropped to remove as much as I could but I still had some of the arms left. There is now an area above both arms that is not mapped but is a part of the new height map. I am trying to think of a way to colour these areas to facilitate a map for cutting into tiles. Or will the tiling work on an odd shaped map? Which way would have the best result towards the map being a collection of tiles in a game engine? Should I leave it like that for water and texture?

Explanations are required to be simple because my idea of turning on a kompewta is to do a strip dance in front of it.

Cheers,
Ionus

Edit: I cant resize the 14930 x 11440 map because it will have to fit in with the rest of Europe one day, so it is probably best if I stick to the SRTM scale that they arrive in.
Ionus
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Re: Editing Height Maps

Postby Aaron » Wed Aug 24, 2016 1:02 pm

Hi Ionus,

I can't say I've often tested this sort of workflow, but my vague feeling is that L3DT shouldn't have any major problems dealing with maps with unfilled regions. Exporting as tiles could be done in two ways: 1) you could simply export the whole map as a tiled set, and exclude the partially filled tiles from your game (as they will look a bit funny), or; 2) you could use the 'Edit->Select area...' and 'File->Export->Export optimised mesh' menu options to manually export areas that exclude the unfilled areas. Indeed, you could use a combination of 1 and 2, whereby you first export the whole map, then carefully re-export the partially-filled tiles using just the valid data areas. Please let me know if you encounter any problems in L3DT with this task, or if you require any modifications.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Re: Editing Height Maps

Postby Ionus » Fri Aug 26, 2016 3:16 am

Hi Aaron,

I have just about abandoned this path even though the auto-flood covered it, the holes came back in every other map created. It also took two days to do the Attributes map, so dealing in tiles will have to do I think.

Cheers!
John
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