File Size recommendations for Imported terrain (*.ter) files

Started by jsw_nz, March 17, 2012, 07:20:20 PM

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jsw_nz

Hi all - a newbie here - was able to get New Zealand DEM data file of South Island and opened using GlobalMapper - zoomed into area in which I live (West Otago) and am now exporting a .ter file - I believe the resolution was second to highest - 8K x 8K - anyway the export process is taking a long time and the expected file size of the *.ter will be just under 200mb - Guessing that this will not be workable inside Terragen 2  (Single Client - Win7 Quad Core 8GB) - just a guess - this is my third day working with Terragen - any suggested advice for recommended file size imports - and/or issues with GlobalMapper generated *.ter files - thanks in advance.

jsw_nz

jo

Hi,

I'm don't see why TG2 wouldn't be able to deal with it, especially if you're using 64 bit Win 7. In TG Classic the largest heightfield supported by the .ter format is 4097 x 4097 but taking a quick look at the TG2 code it doesn't seemed to be bothered about sizes. I'd just try it and see, my guess is that it will be fine.

I'm in NZ too BTW, North Canterbury.

Regards,

Jo

jsw_nz

Hi Jo,

Thanks for the reply - by perusing the forums I find out you are a real veteran - so might I ask this question. Living out here on the shore of Lake Hawea - the thought crossed my mind to get a a *.ter file together to use - interested in this from a landscape oil painting perspective (that's my background). So far no luck- part of this is my inexperience with elevation dataset formats and using the proper tools in using/extracting sections from them. Because of your experience might I ask what app you recommend - I have had a go at Global Mapper - but thus far I cannot crop the entire elevation grid of South Island to a smaller section - it might be the file format itself - which I got from this page of Gegraphx - http://geographx.co.nz/what-we-do/map-data/downloads/ - NZ South 100m Island DEM - 24MB zip - are there any other straightforward apps that would allow me to (1) open up - (2) crop and then (3) export to *.ter format - guessing you might have some experience in this - thusfar no joy using Global Mapper...

kind regards from Hawea - (Terragen Country)
jsw_nz

jo

Hi,

I'm kind of a veteran, I'm one of the developers of TG2 :-).

Anyway, I'm afraid that I haven't had any luck finding a way to crop out your area of interest. On Windows I tried dlgv32 Pro which is kind of a version of Global Mapper. It looks like you can do what you want with it but not with a free version. I also tried Landserf which is a Java app. It could export the data but only one small corner of it. I think this might be because I convinced the developer some years ago that the maximum size for the terrain in a TER file was 4097!  I'm not really an expert on this so others might be able to help. The data is in a widely accepted format so that's not a problem.

FWIW you will probably be able to open the data in v2.5. I can open it with a test version, it can handle the data no problem. You do need to mess with it a bit to get it correctly scaled. I was able to massage the data into a form you can use. I didn't crop out anything, it's the whole South Island. It's also not ideal because I made the sea level have an altitude of 0, so that kind of means the land blends smoothly into a flat area of sea. Anyway, you can download it here if you want to try it out:

http://www.jomeder.com/downloads/South_Island.exr.zip

It's about 17 MB.

The file is an OpenEXR file. To use it do this:

- Go to the Terrain project view and click the "Add Terrain" button.
- Choose "Heightfield (load file)" from the menu.
- In the Open dialog change the file type to "All files" and navigate to the OpenEXR file. Open the file.
- When TG2 has loaded the file you will need to adjust it a little to make it the right size. Make sure the Heightfield Load node which was just created is selected in the Terrain project view list.
- Click the Add Operator button below the list and choose "Heightfield resize".
- In the Heightfield resize node make sure "Re-size in metres" is checked.
- In the first text field for "Re-size in metres" enter 700600.
- In the second field enter 843400.
- Now the heightfield should be the right size, pretty much.

The two steps where you enter numbers are resizing the terrain to the correct size. OpenEXR is an image format and doesn't hold any information scaling. By default TG2 will treat a pixel as being 1m wide so I multiplied the pixel dimensions by 100m because that's the resolution of the data.

You could actually crop this image in Photoshop or some other image editor which supports OpenEXR. You would then load the cropped EXR just like above but in the Heightfield resize node you would enter the cropped image dimensions multiplied by 100.

It's actually pretty good data, considering it's 100m resolution. I've attached an quick test render with the camera kind of at the top of Southland looking north.

Regards,

Jo

jo

This is quite fun actually. Following the steps above I was able to find where I live quite easily. I was going to say that the whole South Island is not easy to navigate around but it wasn't too bad. What you need to do is roughly position the render camera using the shader preview for the Heightfield resize shader . Select the Heightfield resize shader and then click it's shader preview button (little blue window icon at the top of the parameter view). This opens a preview window you can resize quite large. You should be able to see the render camera in the preview, it's a cross with 4 long lines coming off which show the camera's frustum/field of view. You can click on the cross to move the camera to the approximate location you're interested in and then fine tune the view using the 3D Preview. You will probably need to let it refine to its highest detail level to be any use.

I also found it helped to use Google Earth to give me a good idea of the exact terrain shape I should be looking at.

I've attached a quick render of where I live, the red dot more or less being where my house is, within about 100m I reckon.

Regards,

Jo

rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?