Terragen’s current largest terrain size is 4097 equaling to 15,099.49 sq kilometers. The total surface of the earth is about 509,917,870 sq kilometers. You try doing the math. That is insane and one huge heightfield map. :shock: :lol:
That’s if you do it 30m per pixel :P, which is good for aerial views… If you are a detail freak, you only get 4 sq kilometers, and half a meter per pixel 
But yes, that is huge… And there really isn’t a need for more than 4097 if the camera is stationary… 123 Km is already enough for Earth’s curvature to hide mountains 1.2Km high, so it’s nice already…
I can agree that 4097 is more then enough for a decent size local terrain.
I even had a Blue Marble map that i downsized to about 5000 pixels across if the earth were flattend and 123 kilometers squared was about the size of a size 7 font on a 1024 by 768 screen. The earth would be about 39,000 kilometers across in circumference if you were to liy it entirely flat.
I was just amused by the very thought of something on that kind of scale.
We’re going to be building something that big over at The Middle Earth DEM Project. We’re insane. 
The DEM data for the world is on the order of several terabytes I believe, and that’s at 90m.
- Oshyan
Is not the entire Middle Earth about the size of the USA?
Insane? Very!
Theoretically “Middle Earth” is an alternate history of Earth. So it’s Earth-sized. The most mapped areas are about US sized though I suppose, maybe a bit bigger. But we’re aiming for the whole globe ultimately.
- Oshyan
I beleave The Grey Havens to The Sea of Rhun are about a tad smaller then the US. Didn’t Tolkien draw maps of the entire middle earth in some earlier concepts he was exploring which were global sized?
Aiming for the whole globe huh. Sounds like a job for Terragen 2 eventually.
Do you guys have these?
http://www.ziltox.dk/download/middle-earth_map.jpg
http://www.taivaansusi.net/roolipelit/lindefirion/north-western%20middle-earth.jpg
Yep, pretty sure we’ve got those maps. Thanks though. You should hop on over to the project site at http://me-dem.ashundar.com/ Quite honestly I think it’s on another level from what most people imagine. We’re not just taking simple maps and making heightfields out of them, we’re taking projections into account, we’re justifying and accounting for and correcting errors, we’re utilizing an extremely wide range of sources, cataloging geological features as well as flaura and fauna, and we’re pushing a lot of these terrain apps very hard in the process. We’ve been working with a few developers pretty closely to implement some very useful new features and we’ve just finished setting up a forum to discuss advanced terrain modeling in general. Have a look (official announcement to follow very soon): http://terrain.cg-arts.org/forum/
- Oshyan
Actually i have been visiting the ME DEM site for quite some time now. Facinating activities happening to say the least.
Maybie we will see some of those River Network issues resolved some day soon.
Terrain Modeling Summit. Neat! I’ll take a gander at this as well. Thank You for the link.
Maybie we will see some of those River Network issues resolved some day soon.:D I think we are well on the way to resolving the river network issues. I have been running alot of tests with MapWindow/TauDem and Saga Gis on both real world 10m srtm data and heightfields created in WM, Wilbur, L3DT, Leveller and Global Mapper (I think that is everything). Both GIS programs use multiple filters/formulas to identify the natural drainage paths and output this in different ways. MapWindow/TauDem is simple to use, but the best info from it is image based, as far as ME-DEM river networks are concerned. The imagery can be manipulated in PS for use as erosion masks in the heightfield apps and srf distro masks in terragen. Variations on contrast, blur and such allow you to control the erosion effect pretty well with some pre-planning. Saga-gis has 164 or so different modules, though only a small part of that is hydrology related, but one module identifies and allows one to deepen the natural flow channels, and then export a new, modified heightfield in .asc format. There are several routes with this one, i have used succesive iterations of the deepen channels module to really dig them out and then heavily erode this new heightfield in WM. Then combined the original and deepened channel heightfields until I was happy with the output. or just use terragens combine mode. Saga Gis is open source ( grab the beta 2. whatever) and the source is available. MapWindow/TauDem is free also. Monkschain has made a very good 4097 Carn Dun terrain over at ME-DEM which I have been fiddling with and both programs handled it easily. Now if I could just keep up with Monks updated versions I would be happy SeerBlue
I’ve been meaning to check out these softwares. Sounds like a daunting task to get together though. I am still up to see what Johannes cooks up as well.
To my eye, Middle Earth (the area we see in the movies) is around the size of the North island of New Zealand. That size seems to be in accordance with how long it takes characters to travel from place to place too. For Americans, it’s about the size of Georgia.
…several years later and still insane I’ve got some pretty amazing terrain on my hard disk if I do say so myself…it just need a few renders to really do it justice; it sits in my head… mostly.
monks