Hi Folks. Following my previous thread I have a few questions which I hope you won't mind me asking.
I was thrilled and delighted to learn I could render a 32 bit depth map. It has made my life SO much easier. Thank you TG2!!!
The attached shows the idea that I'm exploring: I'm making sketch maps, the kind you see in guidebooks, to label the names of mountains. I start with a UK terrain model (a good one, better than SRTM), then I render the distance map in TG2 and save as .exr.
Then in a custom VB program I read in the distance map as a 2D image, and go down each column of the bitmap looking for abrupt changes in greyscale value. These signifiy silhouettes. By changing the threshold I can alter the map, as shown.
Now, there's two problems I need to ask about. The first is how to avoid antialiasing but still have a smooth terrain surface at the pixel level. With anti aliasing it's harder to detect the edges. But without it TG2 can produce quite a speckled layer in the distance map. I wonder if there's an easy way to smooth these rendered edges without smoothing the data?
Second, I haven't quite understood how much procedural stuff is added on the heightfield. I need to use my elevation models 'as is', I don't want extra fractal detail on top. But I don't know enough about how TG2 generates a mesh from the elevation model. Does is interpolate? If you feed it a coarse elevation raster will it produce a coarse mesh, or will the facet size in the mesh be the same, suggesting that TG2 fills in details?
The reason this is important is because I want to compare different elevation models (some 5m, some 50m, some 100m) to see how realistic or not they render real life features. This means I need to avoid as much as I can Terragen filling in extra terrain information which, while looking good in renders, could distort the validity of me elevation data comparisons. Does that make any sense? So the question really is how faithful is TG2 to the .ter rasters you chuck in, or how much does it smooth them and interpolate them and add fractal detail and whatnot.
Thanks ever so much, I'm still chuffed about getting depth maps. I'm a uni student by the way, I bought a TG2 full license a while ago but have only just got round to using it. Shocking!