Newbie Question - Is this possible?

[thefatalaccidents]

Hello everyone,

I'm brand new to TG and had a brief question.  I've looked through some of the tutorials and found a lot of useful information about using real life data to create things in terragen, but I was wondering if it did something specifically.

So, I have rather high resolution lidar data of a less than 50x50 meter surface.  First of all I'm wanting to use this lidar data and import it into the soil to retain the features of the soil.  I've accomplished this by pulling it into another program and doing an elevation filter from black(low) to white(higher) and scaling it down.  I'm left with a small patch of ground.  Is there any way to extend this or copy this so I don't get a stark contrast to the lidar data set?  Is there an easier way of pulling lidar data in without using an elevation filter and doing a bitmap of the surface? 

Secondly, I'm wanting to place veg specifically in this region and then non-specifically outside of the 50x50 meter region.  There are a lot of tutorials on placing it non-specifically, so I don't really need help with that.  I have x,y,z coordinates for all the different species of vegetation that I've created in xFrog.  I was wondering if there was a shader that allowed you to put these coordinates in.  I also have an excel 2D plot of where all the vegetation needs to be placed if that could possibly be helpful. 

I know this is a lot of questions from someone who hasn't put in a lot of time to figure out the program, so feel free to just direct me to some reading that may help on this subject.  My main problem is that most of the tutorials are for very large scale and non-specific vegetation placement and surface terrain.

Thanks in advance!

[Dune]

My first thought would be to use a simple shape of 50x50m (with a soft edge) to blend your terrain data into the existing soil. If you could somehow get these data as a visual mask, you could import it as an image map shader and set it to repeat, but it would be a simple tile, perhaps with hard edges after all.
The vegetation would best be mapped by a series of masks, I guess. That's what I would do. Convert the Lidar data to gray-scale tiff, and import using the image map shader again.
I hope this helps a bit.

[Tangled-Universe]

If you want to put trees/plants onto your imported terrain you need to import your terrain as either an image or heightfield.
I'm not familiar with LIDAR file-formats, but like Dune said you should be able to get a tiff file or heightfield .ter terrain file out of it with a tool like perhaps 3DEM, Globalmapper or Photomod (http://www.racurs.ru/?page=618)
For example you could export the LIDAR data to DEM with Photomod and convert the DEM to a .ter file with 3DEM and use that as a heightfield in TG2.

Like Dune said you can use a simple shape shader with the same size as the terrain to use that as a mask to mask in/out specific shaders and/or trees/bushes.

Just let us know how it is going, step by step preferably, so we can try to guild you through the process.

Cheers,
Martin

[thefatalaccidents]

Thank you guys for your help, I really appreciate it.  To be honest it doesn't immediately help me, but that is more about my lack of knowledge rather than having a good explanation.  I understand the part about the terrain, although it might take a bit to get the edges of the lidar to not look like... well... edges.  I don't know enough about masks to know if they'll do what I want with the trees. I'll probably have more intelligible questions to ask once I've played around with the software more.  I just wanted to make sure it had the capabilities before I spent some time playing with it. Thanks again!

[thefatalaccidents]

Hey guys,

So I was working on step one and was running into a few problems.  Like I said I wanted the ~50x50m area to not just be surrounded by flat ground.  Also there is a road and a hill beside this road that has vegetation that I would like extended above and below.  I tried to make a blurred bmp tiling the 50x50 bmp and rotating so colors matched.  It didn't turn out all that great.  I was wondering if anyone could help me on how to achieve a better result.  I'm sure I could work with the bmp file to get something better than this, but I just wanted to make sure I was attempting to skin this cat the intelligent way.  I've attached a screenshot of the blurry tiled bmp (original bmp is in the center) and the rendering of this.  Thanks for your help so far.

Cheers,
thefatalaccidents

[Dune]

As far as I can discern your bmp is not really good as a repetitive tile. It would be better if you could blur the edges into total blackness. Then it would smoothly blend into surrounding terrain. If you then set a soft simple shape over it and inversely blend some small perlin displacement, you get a slightly undulated terrain surrounding your bmp area, and just covering the edges of your bmp. But if you need the road (and hill beside it) to extend beyond the bmp, you'd better make a larger, perhaps additional, mask, just for the area outside the bmp, in a less detailed (reduced size) bmp or tiff gray scale file.

I hope this makes sense.

regards,

Dune