Anyone knows MICRODEM ?

Geology and Terrain
#1

I’m trying to learn and use this soft from Peter Guth (Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy) :

http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem.htm
http://www.wood.army.mil/TVC/MicroDEMV6/microdem_ver_60.htm

It might look a bit old, but quite powerfull though : I’m interested especially by the tectonic plates recontruction capabilities.

Idealy, I’d like to know if this software is able to use these continent shapes morphed back in time to actually influence the 16bit grey pixels of any DEM data (a global earth low res GTOPO dataset will do as a first test), then I would inject the result into World-Machine to try some sort of backward erosion on the height of the relief. (you’re thinking what I’m thinking ? …)

Cheers.
Seb.

#2

Hi Seb, I’m not familiar with Microdem (though coincidentally I have bumped into it a few times in the last week), so I can’t really help you. Also, I’m not quite sure what you’re intending to do- it sounds interesting though as it involves plate tectonics - :slight_smile:

Maybe post on the Terrain Summit about this-
http://terrain.cg-arts.org/forum/index.php

monks

#3

Thanks. :slight_smile:

I’m trying to re-create these maps : http://www.scotese.com/
And especially this one : http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/Cret.jpg

I already did some work by painting roughly an input map by hand in Photoshop, but if I can obtain a better result based on real tectonic plates data, piped through world-machine, I could inject it into our 3d globe/terrain engine on which we’ve got some pretty animated dinosaurs ready to walk around… (unfortunately there’s no “paleodem” existing yet : scientist don’t wan’t to release just approximated artistic things, and it makes sense, so I’ve got to create one)

This is all part of this crazy project : http://www.earthsim.tv/index.php?page=wod&action=show_news_story&story=44
(it’s starting to get known since we’re provided with the AMD/ATI 7.5 driver)

But this next version hapenning on the earth in the past (early cretaceous age) is gonna be way beyond anything we’ve ever seen on any PC “virtual globes”.

Cheers.
Seb.

ps: the erosion capabilities of World-machine are playing a major part on the art side of this development by the way : so Id like to thank you again for providing this beautiful piece of software.

#4

Not familiar with Microdem, but Seb I see on some of the screenshots on the Earthsim site that you are using 3dsMax. Do you mind if i ask what you use it for and what kind of workflow you have? I’ll have to download the earthsim browser and check out what its like later. Seems pretty cool!

-Patrick

#5

We use max for modelling/texturing mostly.
Maya for animation : camera shots and dinosaurs skeletons/IK/skinning.
And Qstudio to integrate all these things together and have a full quality preview from our engine (the Q engine)

I had to specialize myself into the field of landscape generators, and we found World-Machine pretty good at that, so we bought it and it’s now fully used in our automated pipeline just between the artist authored height/color maps and our “remapper” producing tiles for an icosahedron we tesselate on the GPU and render with displacement+normal map on the fly.

I shouldn’t give away too much infos, but as you requested it, and as we’re all fans of landscapes and virtual planetry generation tools here : I’m always happy to share more stuff :wink: .

The current earthsim (1.x) doesn’t have anything to do with the next wave we’re preparing (2.0 with the dinos) : it’s just a solarsystem browser on wich we plug documentaries flying around the Bluemarble mapped on a sphere : but it’s still rendered really nicely with great atmosphere effects and we’re getting more and more people who like it as a brilliant “HDTV” style screensaver. (working with Media Center as well)

Hopefully the success we’re getting will allow us to satisfy even more our customers with these animals walking on a paleo planet built from several tools such as world-machine and many others.

For the ones interested by the tectonic plates reconstruction stuff : I’ll continue to post my questions and thoughts on the Terrain Summit forum as advised by monkschain : http://terrain.cg-arts.org/forum/index.php?topic=93.0

Cheers.
Seb.

#6