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[foxfiles]

@SpaceFlight,following your link, I see tha we are 1 year late here... sorry to make Cameni and you waste your time on a subject that was very well approached last year by you

This is just a lesson on How we should always use the Search function prior to writing anything...

[SpaceFlight]

@SpaceFlight,following your link, I see tha we are 1 year late here... sorry to make Cameni and you waste your time on a subject that was very well approached last year by you

This is just a lesson on How we should always use the Search function prior to writing anything...

I don't think a thread that talks about DEMs that could be used in OT is a waste of time. The other thread was mainly about integrating a middle earth DEM into OT.
I did not find an other thread that talked about this topic at that time, and I did not want to make a new one. This will sureley come up again in the future, as more detailed DEMs become available.
So a thread like this one ("Terrain detail versus google earth") is surely informative in this regard. 

[foxfiles]

I agree, I took the time to read this 2011 thread now , sure it is useful to recall things that interest us about DEM...

[SpaceFlight]

What about trees, buildings and other stuff effecting the higher resolution data?

A Digital Elevation Model and a Digital Terrain Model represent the bare earth surface, while the DEM is unmodified and the DTM is modified and corrected for artifacts and other errors.
A Digital Surface Model represents the earth's surface with everything on it, like buildings, trees etc. (http://bloglidar.com/2010/12/06/dem-dsm-dtm/).
So in order to get a DEM or DTM, the DSM has to go through a filtering process ("It can be said that a DSM is filtered to produce a DTM or a DEM. Objects and surface variability are removed in this filtering process." http://www.helsinki.fi/~korpela/y196/y196.htm).

[Jagerbomber]

Well I'm thinking that even after this "filtering" process, Forests and locations with a lot of obstacles would still effect the elevation data.

[lookastdu]

One is wanting Hawai, another one Tahiti, another one... should you pay to have Hawai at 10m ?
 this could enter in a biz model, where users pay depending on the resolution and geography that they use...
[...]
Also let's be careful with our wishes of better resolution : going to 30 or 10m is a question of dealing with source of hundreds of Gb, even Teras for the whole planet at High res.

Sorry, I have shorted my idea too much writing that words. I was thinking about possibility to import to Outerra for example your own heightmaps in .dem or other format which contain data coordinates. Then everyone who needs detailed fragment of map will be able to achieve it. Yes, I know it would be additional work to do by developers, but maybe in farther future?
Ofc I wasn't thinking about giving everyone detailed Hawaii and 1GB+ to download.

[Allan Davidson]

Necromancer here!

And how about use a data compression and real-time decompression method (OpenCL?) to reduce the size of the terrain files? This could help if you guys manage to obtain 30m/10m elevation data to some areas.

[cameni]

Terrain is already compressed with wavelet compression, otherwise the dataset would be 10 times larger

[ktroy]

So what's the possibility of downloadable 30m/10m terrain data for parts of the US?
Even remotely close?

[cameni]

It's planned for testing, I guess there will be some issues with blending with the surrounding terrain of lower resolution that will have to be addressed.

[foxfiles]

  we look forward to seeing such a terrain insertion... even if there would be bad stitching with surroundings, it is worth it
for having an idea of the performance in high res. DEM

[eyeandeye]

Hi guys(and gals?)

Has anyone been keeping up with WorldDEM? It's a German (I think) project that launched two satellites, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X to make a global DEM at 10 or 12 meter resolution. Supposedly will be finished in 2014. I'm guessing it isn't free, but...would resolution like that be possible in Outerra eventually?

From their website:
Vertical accuracy: 2m (relative) / 10m (absolute)
12m x 12m raster
Global homogeneity

Until two days ago I didn't even know what a DEM was. I recently became interested in mapping a real life location into Cryengine 3 SDK, and decided a heightmap from a DEM was the way to go (previous attempts mostly revolved around Google Earth data but I was disappointed by the level of detail).

During my quest to find something better than SRTM 90, I stumbled upon National Map Viewer that uses the National Elevation Dataset. In addition to 1 arc-second data for the U.S., they have 1/3 and I was lucky enough that they even had 1/9 for my area. However it was packaged in a .IMG format that I haven't figured out how to open in Microdem. Incidentally any advice on free tools that would help my project would be appreciated.

Fun stuff! My next goal is to get the heightmap to my liking, import it to cryengine, and overlay it with satellite imagery from Google to give me a reference to build off of.

[rndmplyr]

I just stumbled upon this thread. If you (or anyone else) is still interested in using the USGS DEMs, this http://www.massgate.net/read.php?77960,111959 is a World in Conflict forums post (based upon a Supreme Commander forums post) on how to extract the elevations for map making. Maybe it's useful for you; if not, I am sorry for the necromancy

[eyeandeye]

Thanks rndmplyr, I'll check that out at some point. I'm kind of in limbo right now as I wait for Crytek to implement their new Segmented Worlds feature, to see how that will affect large-map creation.

In regards to my previous post, I eventually got my DEM open in Microdem but ran into problems converting it to grayscale. For some reason the grayscale heightmap Microdem produced always resulted in a huge loss of quality in the elevation data; all the finer terrain details were missing. I had a long back and forth with Microdem's creator about how to make it work, and apparently it was impossible because Microdem only does 8-bit grayscale. I feel like we never quite got on the same page but I also think I was just too ignorant about the subject matter to understand why I couldn't do what I was wanting to do. Here's the full thread for fellow newbs trying to learn this stuff:
http://forums.delphiforums.com/microdem/messages?msg=1460.19

Eventually I came up with a different solution, thanks to the assistance of a helpful person at crydev.net:
1. Load .IMG file in Microdem
2. Choose desired subset of data and save that subset to a new file in the Microdem format (.dem).
3. Convert the .dem file to .asc (Arc Grid)
4. Import the .asc file into VTBuilder and export it as .bt
5. Load the .bt file into Terresculptor, tweak elevations if necessary, and export to .r16 (.r16 and .raw are the same, but Cryengine likes the .r16 file extension)
6. Import the .r16 into Cryengine (I never actually did this step because I was also struggling to find a way to crop an exact 8km x 8km square out of my DEM, and wasn't satisfied with my eyeballed attempts.)
The full crydev thread is here:
http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=321&t=115998

Someone also recently recommended I use World Machine. I looked into it once, and recently downloaded the demo to check it out but I can't find any indication that World Machine is capable of importing a DEM. Actually, the only import function I can find seems to be for World Machine's proprietary files. If anyone happens to know more about that program and if it can help me that would be great. It would also be great if you could do me the favor of posting said knowledge in this thread for me to see.

Last thing: did my previous post get merged into another thread? I usually read threads before posting, especially short ones, and my post looks stupid since Astrium and their WorldDEM project were mentioned several times already. I can't imagine I skipped over all that. I'm just curious

[cameni]

Last thing: did my previous post get merged into another thread? I usually read threads before posting, especially short ones, and my post looks stupid since Astrium and their WorldDEM project were mentioned several times already. I can't imagine I skipped over all that. I'm just curious

Nobody knows anymore

Has anyone been keeping up with WorldDEM? It's a German (I think) project that launched two satellites, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X to make a global DEM at 10 or 12 meter resolution. Supposedly will be finished in 2014. I'm guessing it isn't free, but...would resolution like that be possible in Outerra eventually?

From their website:
Vertical accuracy: 2m (relative) / 10m (absolute)
12m x 12m raster
Global homogeneity

Generally the finer source, the better it will look in OT, provided the source is a DTM and not a DSM.