Height maps

[fuzzylr]

I know this may not be the place to ask this. But if I wanted a height map of Japan and it's islands. Do you guys have a site I can go to get this information? I read something once on one of these forums but I can seem to find the post.

How big can we get with UDK maps before we start causing problems? I didn't see any posts on that here or in the developers corner.

[Saishy]

I know this may not be the place to ask this. But if I wanted a height map of Japan and it's islands. Do you guys have a site I can go to get this information? I read something once on one of these forums but I can seem to find the post.

How big can we get with UDK maps before we start causing problems? I didn't see any posts on that here or in the developers corner.

Google earth and map have this.
I suggest using the earth version because of the size.

[fuzzylr]

You mean google earth right? I'm new to this process so I'm just making sure.

[fuzzylr]

Ok, I've followed a couple of using google to make height maps. However, when I get it into the game everything is wrong. Most of these tutorials are very incomplete and assume you have a wealth of knowledge about UDK.

Does anyone have a tut for creating custom height maps and bringing them into UDK?

[WHICKED]

Give me a link to the ones you have found, and I will try to help you as much as I can.

-WHICKED

[AreDub3D]

There's not much out there regarding heightmaps, but then there's not that much to it: Make sure your terrain size is power of 2 + 1 (e.g. 257 x 257).Convert your heightmap to the G16 format with HMCS (now v2, I think), and import it into UDK using the terrain mode window.

So you want to build all of Japan in a single terrain?

Using the standard player scale, I think the maximum terrain map size is only a few km square. I'd guess the entire grid visible in the orthographic views is about 10km square. (Just a guess!) The level I'm currently working on is about 3km x 3km. To bring Japan's height data into one terrain, you'd have to scale the player (and everything else) WAY down, but I have no idea if that would work.

Edit: Just want to add, using a 257 x 257 (or even 513 x 513) map, the resolution of your terrain is obviously limited. Others may have had more luck than me, but 257 is as big as I have been able to use without stability issues.

[Allar]

I'm not sure about how this will work in practice, but from what I gather it seems doable...


If you split Japan into several height maps, you can lay out seperate terrain patches next to eachother and then perform some LOD magic so that as you zoom out, to say x distance, 4 patches will then swap to 1 lower res heightmap, and if you keep zooming out, 4 of those patches will swap to another low res height map.

I'm not sure if this will work for terrain, but hey, worth a shot.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MassiveLOD.html

[LordAero]

HERE (http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/SELECTION/Resampled_box.asp) are two Geotif for the entire globe, i think the one you can use is the 500m one (599Mb)

[KazeoHin]

RTFUDN (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TerrainHeightmaps.html)


tenchars

[FlynT]

Use this it supports the UT3 Format. http://www.lilchips.com/hmcs2.asp

[Rolsen Royce]

How did he get heightmaps out of Google Earth?
I have tried the STRM-something.something-plugin, but It doesn't cover my areas of interest :(