Hi Servo,
Servo wrote:the scale on the dem when I load it says its set at 2911.
Hmm...that's odd. The resolution of that GTOPO30 DEM should be 30 arcseconds, which works out as about 900 metres, or about 2900 feet (not 2900 metres!). This makes me think that either VTBuilder is incorrectly reporting the scale units, or more likely, that L3DT is not properly reading the BT horizontal scale. I'll download the DEM an have a poke around.
In any case, I should think the DEM resolution is rather poor for most types of games, since the
smallest feature that can be represented in that DEM is a shade under a kilometre wide (or a bit over half a mile, if you prefer old-school units). For FPS/FP-RPG style games I normally recommend a horizontal scale of between 0.5m and 2m for best results, and for RTS and flight-sims no more than about 20m. Nine hundred metres is rather coarse indeed.
If you're after higher-resolution DEM data, you can freely download the 1 arcsecond (~30m) resolution
Shuttle Radar Tomography Mission data from NASA's ftp server
here. VTBuilder should read these files OK (or so says the FAQ).
Servo wrote:Now here is the main question. I have a bunch of high maps that are not of even scaling. Is it possible to scale the hightmaps in L3DT so they can be exported to atlas terrain??
It's possible, but somewhat difficult. If you have tiles of different horizontal scalings, you will first need to rescale
and resize them to change the pixel density without changing the physical extents. After all your tiles have the same pixel density, you can import them into one big file by repeated use of the
atMergeMap plugin, which is included by default with the more recent builds of L3DT. Please note that it may be advantageous to update to the most recent developmental build (see downloads page), as it supports 'undo' for the map merging operation, which may be useful as mistakes are easy to make with this interface.
Servo wrote:Basicly I want to combine 32 hightmaps of the world together to make one detailed hightmap that I can export into atlas but not loose scaling on details.
That sounds rather challenging. As I understand it, Atlas has an effective upper limit of 4096 x 4096 heightmap pixels per file at present. Furthermore, multiple Atlas files cannot currently be stitched together in TGEA without showing seams or gaps.
Cheerio,
Aaron.