Adjusting terrain height

[Guest adevins]

Hi, im completely new to mesh design, but id like to give it a go.My home town has been built and the coastline has been made more accurate.I would like to make (it doesnt have to be accurate) a few different hills aswell as adjust the height of a local mountain.I only have the information from an ordnace survey map, and I cant get access to satelite imagaery.What tools will I need for this?ThanksAl

[Holger 0]

Hi Al:taking a break from aircraft design ;-)First off, let me quote myself:"There's no step-by-step tutorial for mesh design out there but the site that comes closest to that would be Steve's: http://www.fs-traveler.com/welcome.shtml. In addition, you do want to read the FS2002 Scenery SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2002_downloads_sdk.asp ) for the basics. Finally, the MS TMFViewer utility is the most efficient tool for checking your mesh before installing in FS (part of the Custom Terrain Textures SDK on the same site)."That's a pretty tricky situation for a first stab at mesh design. In most cases people have some sort of digital data available. Basically, you want to somehow set up a grid (in the FS lat/long - WGS84 projection) of elevation values and there are several options I can think of:1. If the area is quite small you could try the re-mesh option in Ground2K4. It doesn't actually create a mesh but rather tiny polygons with elevation values but it might work okay (never done this myself; in fact, I have never done any of those things I'm suggesting, at least not for FS projects).2. To make your elevation raster grid from a scan of your topo map you could try either Grises50, by Jokin Bedialauneta (http://www.simviation.com/fsdesign_tute1.htm), the tools developed by John Childs (http://www.terrainmap.com/rm19.html#raster), or perhaps "Wilbur" (http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html).3. You could start with a base DEM of your area (the best one available are probably the Shuttle Radar 30 arc-sec, at ftp://edcsgs9.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/srtm/SRTM30), resample it at a higher resolution (say, LOD9, 76 meters) and edit the raw DEM to build up your 'hills'. For these procedures you'd need to download Microdem (http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem.htm), which is a rather big piece of software for a smallish task ;-)4. Do it the low-tech way by drawing a raster grid of known scale on top of your topographic map (or use a mylar sheet) and determine the elevation at each vertex (I remember making a DEM in this manner for a research project in Patagonia, in the age before there were any digital files available for South America). Then use a text editor to enter all the data and convert it to the MS standard (see the SDK documents).Hope this gets you started. Perhaps someone else is lurking here who has done a project like yours.Cheers, Holger

[Guest adevins]

Hi, thanks for your reply, I guess I am taking a break, ive been doing so many different things that I thought Id just fly around for a while, and I got fed up with the default mesh for my area.I will give all the links a go and see what I can do.What i plan to do is just the area around my local airport, not even 5 square miles, but from the OS map, draw the contour lines in 3ds max and create a terrain from them at the correct altitudes, render this and use it as a DEM, i think that should be ok, ya?I had a look at this: ftp://edcsgs9.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/srtm/SRTM30will this have images of ireland? i didnt have time earlier today to go through them all, and plus I couldnt see my local coordinates on the list.Thanks again, no doubt ill be here again with more problems :)Al

[Holger 0]

Hi Al:sounds like a plan...The SRTM30 tile you're looking for is named "W020N90". It covers Latitude N40-90 and Longitude -20 to 20, giving you Ireland (I assume that's what you're working on), plus anything between Iceland and Greece at no extra cost ;-)Cheers, Holger