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Guest Horst

Un-round?

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Guest wyoming

First, pardon any repetition: I very significantly decreased the amount of time dedicated to this hobby over the past couple of years and I don't follow closely the forums any longer.For some time now I have been bothered by the rounded appearance of earth representation in MFS. It tends to look like some underwater landscape. Consequently, I have been toying with the idea of improving this aspect. Of course, a tighter mesh would theoretically do the trick but the definition would have to be so tiny that it would not work. Rather, I'm thinking about some sort of fractal correction/addition implemented when the slope increases beyond a certain level. A mathematical exaggeration of sorts... Does that make sense to the experts here? Or is it totally off?

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Hi there,interesting idea but I'm a bit confused as to its need. The highest mesh resolution FS9 can be set to display is ~19-m spacing. If the source data are of sufficient quality, like the 10-m USGS NED or 23-m Canadian CDED1 data, then the definition of sharp-edged ridges or steep-sided canyons is very decent. In fact, some of those data have almost too much definition as the hard-coded auto-switching to cliff textures in FS at approx 40 degrees of slope makes many places look much more barren than they are in reality.Unfortunately, for most of the planet the 90-m SRTM data offer the best readily available resolution but I'm not sure that artificial introduction of noise - which is what you seem to propose - would aid the primary goal: a more accurate rendition of the landscape.But maybe I'm not understanding what you'd like to achieve?Cheers, Holger

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Guest wyoming

Hi!It's not so much the accuracy of the rendition, as in the hill is where it's supposed to be and matches the, say, 20m level curves, than the look of it. When you look at mountainous areas, such as the Alps for example and even with the sceneries/mesh developed there, or the Himalayas, the appearance is rounded rather than ragged as it is to the eye, which I understand is the result of the cumulative effect of the suppression, or the averaging, of any variation within the mesh unit. For steep formations, the appearance is flat, like a smooth plane, still with none of the "raggedy" look, which the placating of the texture doesn't help much. If we could have the computing power to process a 1 ft resolution grid, that would take care of it. But we obviously can't, so I'm thinking that we could do something *within* the mesh unit, like you say, add noise. Perhaps transforming the mesh unit from a square to a mathematical series of triangles with randomized variations in height... The idea would be to try to find a fixed mathematical transformation that would be as economical as possible: take a square and make it "messy"...???

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Guest wyoming

Thanks so much for your references. I will dig into it. And outstanding work re. your screen!! And, yes, accurate is better than messy (although nature often looks quite messy). Regards.Nick--

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Guest Horst

Hello,First screenshot is from a nice commercial addon, I manipulated.Second: is only an interpolated SRTM Dem in Suisse (I think. Do not know exactly anymore), with a LC using Arviddson textures.I did myself.To look for more Dem FS information, you can read on this site:http://www.fs-traveler.com/overview.shtmlYou will find out, you need a lot of data amount to have a high (i.e LOD9) Dem for the whole world. A

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