Heightfield Tiles

[Tudor]

I'm really struggling with tiles.
I would just not do tiles if I could but the source material is too big.

The tiles shown in the below pics show the three problems I'm having.
1. Tiles are being placed at different heights... there is no generated terrain below them so I can't imagine why they'd be doing that.  Because they do this they cause a line to go across my landscape which I can't remove because I can't move the item up and down to match each others vertical position

2. One of the tiles is randomly coming in huge... that same tile is causing 'tearing' which you can see in the one image as a huge vertical like of material.

3. Placing items directly beside each other still causes there to be a line in between each tile.  I'm forced to overlap them which means I'm losing details.  Do I need to create an overlap within Global Mapper to resolve this or is there a clean way to solve this in Terragen?

How do I resolve these issues?

I really want this to work but I can't get past what I feel should be the simple stuff to get to the texturing bit.  Quite frustrating.

Tudor

[RArcher]

A few things you can try:

1. The lines between the tiles can sometimes be eliminated by changing the border blending to be a negative number.  This needs to be a very very small number otherwise you lose too much data - like -0.001.

2. The huge area that is either projecting up or down can be caused by at least a couple things.  If there are patches of missing data in your set then these areas are set to weird height numbers.  This can be fixed by entering the height you would like the landscape to be in the replace NODATA values field.  If the strange areas are happening only at the very edge of your data set then what I have had happen before is that I've accidentally including a pixel or two of pure white in my data crop.  This makes the edge go really high. You can fix this by cropping in a pixel or two when doing your export.

3. The best way to make the entire landscape usable while keeping the high quality data would be to download a much larger area than you need in a lower resolution and then use that as your base landscape.  Then you won't see the sharp edges.

[tjhb]

Point 3 is genius.

Regarding 1 and 2, do these suggest that denormalised values are being handled incorrectly at tile edges? (Or possibly not at all.) That would be a bug, assuming that the use of DEM tiles is supported, as seems to be the case from import options.

[Tudor]

Thanks for these replies
I will give this a go and see what I can come up with.
I'm also able to export overlapping tiles out of Global Mapper so I'm going to try that/crop a little/do the math on the rest (re: how much to overlap) and then see how things pan out.
Tudor

[DannyG]

How about a height-field vertical adjust?

[Tudor]

Height Field Vertical Adjust.... That exists?
Wow... I hate that I had no idea that was there.
Thanks so much for this suggestion.
That will resolve the issue.
Cheers,
Tudor

[DannyG]

No problem that's why we are all here, Cheers