Grayscale heightmap size

[londonsmee]

Hi I can import grayscale images to TG2 and moving on to my next island. Now the island is @50miles wide, so like 2.5k sq what IM trying to figure out whats the best size of height map, I used 4k wide with last last one but wondering what I can get away with.

Also what's the best smoothing range to use with Gaussian blur. IM using 10% k for each terrain difference.


Many thanks

[Oshyan]

At that scale you'll want to use as high a resolution as possible. You could easily do 8k square, I have several scenes that use terrains that size without problems.

- Oshyan

[londonsmee]

Cheers. do you do separate model setup or set everything on the scene. Not worrying about pop, or objects. Or do you find it better to use a  base terrain then set a scene area for render.  tiff, png or bmp??

[gregsandor]

... Now the island is @50miles wide, so like 2.5k sq

50 miles = 80.4672 kilometers, not 2.5 k

You can use whatever size heightmap your machine can handle. 

[londonsmee]

.@ 50miles wide 50miles long 2.5k miles Sq

EDIT
Sorry for quick replying from my phone. I ended up going for greyscale 11321x800 at 94dpi  resulting in a 259mb file. I'm thinking this might be too small as I have had to add a heightmap smoothing of 10% to it.

Heres how its progressed. but thanks for the reminder of the km's I had put 50k in TG, which must make me a nasa engineer they do that type of mistake cm/inch's

[attachimg=1]

[londonsmee]

I just had another look and realised that i was not using a square heightmap to start with. Which was a boo boo, then once changed that so to make easy with TG I then thought 10k px x 10k px shouldnt give me 300mb file. So changed it to Greyscale. lol. and its 97mbs. So with that decided to go for 20k px x 20k  for 390mb. Hope that will mean I wont have to use Heightmap smoothing

Thanks for making me relook what I had done.

[gregsandor]

.@ 50miles wide 50miles long 2.5k miles Sq

EDIT
Sorry for quick replying from my phone. I ended up going for greyscale 11321x800 at 94dpi  resulting in a 259mb file. I'm thinking this might be too small as I have had to add a heightmap smoothing of 10% to it.

Heres how its progressed. but thanks for the reminder of the km's I had put 50k in TG, which must make me a nasa engineer they do that type of mistake cm/inch's

Even this mistake doesn't make sense.  neither 50 km nor 50 miles is anywhere near 2.5 km.  Use a calculator.  A useful one is  http://www.onlineconversion.com/length_common.htm

Also, d.p.i doesn't matter, ignore it.  It is for printing images.  Has nothing to do with terrain.  Also I don't care how many MB it takes up, that only matters in terms of your computer's power and whether it can handle it.

Here's what you need to pay attention to:

Number of pixels for the width and the height of your elevation map.  Also how many meters each represents.

Your elevation map's resolution is found by multiplying width in pixels by width in meters, same for height.  That is to say, if your terrain map is 1000 pixels wide, and it covers an area in the world of 10,000 meters, then the resolution is 10m/px  (10,000 meters divided by 1000 pixels = 10 meters per pixel).

You don't have to use a square map.

How many meters are covered by the width and height of your map?

[londonsmee]

@ 80k in each direction.

[gregsandor]

@ 80k in each direction.

How can that be?  Your map images posted above are rectangular not square, wider than they are tall.