Any method to make inland waterbodies directly from mes...

[Guest ps76]

HiHave recently been using Slartibartfast to make Ocean shores from only mesh data. So far processing is excellent because it make shores which perfectly fit my mesh in like 10secs!However inland waterbodies I find much harder. Have used waterbody data to make a watermap but never get a perfect fit, making big drops into my mountain lakes occassionally. Would love to expand the 'make only from mesh' feature so Slartibartfast might take elevation values from regions in my watermap and then make waterbodies directly from the mesh at those elevations by kinda using individual 'SeaLevel=x' values for every region individually. All I would need to do is paint watermap grayscale heights and maybe paint a little extended ring onto all the inland waterbodies to prevent any misalignment error and make sure the whole lake area is used when making the waterbody from the mesh.Hope this isn't too badly explained. Have tried using 'SeaLevel=x' feature & processing only one lake by limiting the destination boundaries - it makes a perfect lake but only at intended 0m elevation & I haven't been able to figure out the .bgs file to update the polygon height to what I need.Any help/tips on this or any other method to make fast accurate inland waterbodies would be great.Many thanksP.

[Guest Horst]

Hello,Quote:

[Holger 0]

Hi there,Slarti does offer the option to determine lake elevation from the mesh data. If you have your lake/river watermask then you just need to set LWMCling accordingly.Obviously, the resulting accuracy of the lake elevations depends on the accuracy of the input mesh data. The first version of the SRTM data was pretty bad but the new "final" version flattens at least the bigger lakes, which helps Slarti to find an appropriate elevation. If you're using USGS NED or other high-res data then there will be even less mismatches.You will need to do some manual editing of Slarti's lake LWM file because of the way water is broken up into LOD13 areas; some lakes end up with slight differences in elevation in adjacent LOD13 areas. However, editing can be done quite quickly in the LWM bgs itself. For that I load the mesh into TMFViewer with the LWM as overlay (to determine correct elevation) and also load the same LWM into LWMViewer to find Cell and Area IDs. Works very nicely but takes a bit longer than 10 sec ;-)One other thing I do is split the inland water mask into three separate masks: one for the big lakes (flattened with shorelines), one for small lakes (flattened, no shorelines), and one for rivers (mesh clinging, no shorelines). That helps with the editing and also looks much nicer (and realistic) in the sim.The slight mismatch between LWM polys and VTP shorelines that Horst refers to is not really a problem if you use suitable shoreline textures and widths.Cheers, HolgerP.S.: Sorry, pictures are a bit dark.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/126679.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/126680.jpg

[Guest ps76]

HiMany thanks for the info. The region I'm updating is in Alaska - LOD 5 tile 908100. I'm using mesh & waterbodies data from http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.php. Maybe I might only need more accurate inland water data because it's only the inland waterbody placement making the problem. Have tried LMWCling=0 feature but a few large lakes had the multiple elevation levels so just ended up filling the watermask bodies manually in Cinepaint to make a watermap (my water data has only 30-40 waterbodies for the whole LOD 5 tile).Though I really like the feature of Slartibartfast where it kinda fills in mesh itself with ocean when provided only mesh as source and with Coastline=1. Because then I don't need accurate Ocean shorelines data (I'm using NED mesh) which I then have to have fit perfectly with the mesh. I guess the feature I want doesn't exist (though I mailed a request to admin@jimkeir) but I just kinda wanted to do a similar thing for inland waterbodies.For now I'll look for different water data and try to match it up more accurately. Maybe will also look into SBuilder & AutoASM for improvements too.Many thanksP.