NASA\USGS "Original TIF" versions of heightmaps

[WAS]

These TIFs appear blank, and have no profile when I import into photoshop. Both settings to apply to create/apply a profile are blank black images.

However, in affinity photo it does open, but is just all messed up and not even a heightmap.

What's going on here?

https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Mars/Mars2020/JEZ_hirise_soc_006_DTM_MOLAtopography_DeltaGeoid_1m_Eqc_latTs0_lon0_blend40

The software mentioned on this page that was used to create it, appears to be removed from the website. Even searching it directly, every link goes to a 404: https://nsidc.org/search-results.html?q=velmap

[Dune]

Maybe check out this link for better tifs: https://planetarymaps.usgs.gov/mosaic/mars2020_trn/HiRISE/

[WAS]

That's just the raw files, such as uncomposited ones. That's where I actually originally downloaded the composite by file size.

[Dune]

I didn't have a closer look. Not my kind of game anyway.

[WAS]

Hmm seems it wouldn't matter for now for me. My buddy was able to send me a whopper of a converted tif at 4gb. But I cant manipulate them because alas, I don't have enough RAM. I have scratch set on my 1tb with plenty of room, but ram memory immediately gets filled regardless and system reduces to a crawl. Just pasting a duplicate layer is taking over 10 minutes and about to end task.

And to properly smooth for 32bit float I still need to upscale 100% and guassian blur and reduce back down in 32bit mode to get the bilinear smooth stepping of the terrain.  Just handling single maps from these assets, or models in blender are painfully slow. 

PS Terragen itself handles these large files amazingly, I must add. Its crazy how TG just spits out these huge asset scenes the way it does. Especially when I calculate a scenes assets at nearly double my available 30gb (after OS).

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

Not sure why a DEM would be all black.  Normally high quality DEM's appear mostly white in Photoshop because they are 32-bit.

You would normally do an adjust Exposure, and scrub through the various exposure levels with the slider to get a preview of the different areas.

If you have a specific DEM you want me to look at I can load pretty much anything on my 128GB Threadripper box.  Just email or PM me.

I have been doing a lot of work with DEM's lately and have had good luck with the 1/3 Arc Second stuff from USGS NED as Tiff.

The GeoTiffs have been improved in many cases over the old GridFloat DEM's.

Derek

[WAS]

The tif I was trying to get into PS is this one (beware it's 1.8gb): https://planetarymaps.usgs.gov/mosaic/mars2020_trn/HiRISE/JEZ_hirise_soc_006_DTM_MOLAtopography_DeltaGeoid_1m_Eqc_latTs0_lon0_blend40.tif

It's a HiRise DTM at 1m so should have good detail. But loading it directly in TG has issues, and aligning textures in TG would be a pain with rotation/scale, which is where I was trying to use Photoshop to quickly snap in the correct orientation and scale.

[Dune]

scrub through the various exposure levels with the slider

I did that and briefly saw a glimpse of what it needed to look like, but slided past it and never found that particular setting again. So it's obviously a very defined small area that would show something. Automatic doesn't do a thing either.

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

The tif I was trying to get into PS is this one (beware it's 1.8gb): https://planetarymaps.usgs.gov/mosaic/mars2020_trn/HiRISE/JEZ_hirise_soc_006_DTM_MOLAtopography_DeltaGeoid_1m_Eqc_latTs0_lon0_blend40.tif

It's a HiRise DTM at 1m so should have good detail. But loading it directly in TG has issues, and aligning textures in TG would be a pain with rotation/scale, which is where I was trying to use Photoshop to quickly snap in the correct orientation and scale.

Wow that web site has a super fast server/connection.  I have never seen a near 2GB file download so fast!!  I'll take a look and let ya know what I see.

Derek

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

I checked into that tif file and also went to the directory it is in and downloaded a bunch of other files.  It seems the files that contain "DTM" in the file name are all black, and just contain a bunch of negative values.
There is a good amount of data in the file, since when I 7-zip compress it there is still 500MB of data left.  For reference, I compressed a 32k 32-bit all black grayscale .psb image from 4GB down to 618KB.
It could be some tif format that needs to be read by some specific program.

Derek

[Kadri]

If anyone wants a closer look and get this to work better in Terragen this is the scene file i made.
Very basic actually.
The real problem could be the Tif file itself maybe or our workflow. Or Terragen's geotiff loader etc. needs an update i don't know.
You can see the problematic borders.

I used the same Geotif file Jordan posted in the first post.

[D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)]

It loads into Terragen fine, but it's not very nice.  Maybe at ground level you could do a few camera angles with it that might look ok.

I'll try doing a Heightfield generate from shader to extract the DEM into a more normal heightmap.

[Kadri]

I tried some other things without success. So then used the most basic way by masking it.
You can see the geotif file in Affinity photo. I made a crude mask (shrinked and blurred the borders) based on that original and used that as the mask.
This worked. The problematic borders became smooth.

By the way if you use stepped in the heighfield node (Heightfield shader 01-displacement tab-interpolation method) the borders look good.
But the ground becomes yeah stepped. Oversmooth looks fine too. But i didn't compared it with Catmull-Rom. Might be enough too.

The image below is from the masked version. You don't need the "Heightfield clip vertical" node with this method.

[WAS]

I tried some other things without success. So then used the most basic way by masking it.
You can see the geotif file in Affinity photo. I made a crude mask (shrinked and blurred the borders) based on that original and used that as the mask.
This worked. The problematic borders became smooth.

By the way if you use stepped in the heighfield node (Heightfield shader 01-displacement tab-interpolation method) the borders look good.
But the ground becomes yeah stepped. Oversmooth looks fine too. But i didn't compared it with Catmull-Rom. Might be enough too.

The image below is from the masked version. You don't need the "Heightfield clip vertical" node with this method.

I wonder if resaving that as a EXR since it's a heightfield would work. See the edge boundary issue is fixed here.

[Kadri]

I tried some other things without success. So then used the most basic way by masking it.
You can see the geotif file in Affinity photo. I made a crude mask (shrinked and blurred the borders) based on that original and used that as the mask.
This worked. The problematic borders became smooth.

By the way if you use stepped in the heighfield node (Heightfield shader 01-displacement tab-interpolation method) the borders look good.
But the ground becomes yeah stepped. Oversmooth looks fine too. But i didn't compared it with Catmull-Rom. Might be enough too.

The image below is from the masked version. You don't need the "Heightfield clip vertical" node with this method.

I wonder if resaving that as a EXR since it's a heightfield would work. See the edge boundary issue is fixed here.

Yes.