How to make a heightmap of a real place?

[sonicadam132]

I would like to know how to make a heightmap of a real place? it's for Fallout NV. so if anyone knows can you please help?

[TrickyVein]

Yep, but it's not simple.

 

You can obtain elevation data from 'real places' from lots of sources but the USGS offers DEM data at varying resolutions for free. You can use their web viewer to select data for a region and download them.

 

Once you have those, you can use various GIS applications to take the floating point image and convert to a .bmp.

 

Then, when you have your .bmp you can process it in photoshop to ready for importing it into the GECK. I've written a guide of sorts for this whole process which you can find a link to in my signature.

[madmongo]

I've been making some FNV equivalents of real areas lately. While you can do what TrickyVein posted, I personally wouldn't recommend it. The game uses kind of a compressed landscape combined with an increased time scale. This helps to draw things closer together so that players don't feel so much like they are just walking and walking and walking and walking to get from one place to the next.

 

What I have been doing is going to google maps and clicking on satellite view to get a rough idea of the terrain, then creating a rough compressed version of that using the heightmap editor. It's more art than science, as you want things like airport runways to be close to full size so they look right in-game, but then they end up taking up more space on the terrain map (percentage-wise) than they do in real life so sometimes you need to move things around, etc.

 

Go to Google Maps and compare the real areas of Goodsprings and Las Vegas to what is in game and you'll see what I mean by how much they compress and use smaller versions of things to make them game-able. The real Goodsprings has about 4 times as many streets and buildings and Las Vegas is huge compared to what is in-game.

 

Your map area in-game is limited to 64x64 cells (-32 to +32 in the X and Y directions). Trying to map real terrain in real life size onto that isn't going to fit much.

[SayinNuthin]

Tricky and Mongo giving sage advice but less I'm mistaken SonicAdam is working on a UK mod. In which case he's going to need the UK Ordinance Survey dems, which were hideously expensive before the O.S. made the free ones a few years ago. Two things 1st they were (it's been a while) in a format called NTS.. NTF .. something like that.. and 2nd the resolution was over twice the USGS's stuff. Which made the files hefty things to mess with.

 

What I can suggest, if you run into problems, you could always try asking for help from the Royal Geographical Society. Who when ever I've needed help have been almost desperate to prove they are not just a bunch of old fuddy-duddies and Rodneys, and they have a lot of maps and know a lot about geography, including all the latest techniques.

[madmongo]

If you are doing the UK, you've really got your work cut out for you. I just took a look at the UK on google maps and the first thing that struck me is how dense everything is. I've been working on areas of Nevada and California where the population densitiy is much smaller and civilized areas are limited to small pockets spaced widely apart. The UK is just littered with tiny little towns all over the space with very little empty space between them.

 

London and its immediate surrounding area would probably be one map all on its own, kinda like Fallout 3 and the DC area and wasteland. If you look into Fallout 3 one thing you'll find is that their original DC area was much bigger, but players found it to be too confusing so they downsized it quite a bit. You would have to do the same thing with London. You don't want to recreate London. What you want to do is create a small area that captures the feel of London.

 

When you get outside of the big cities, you are going to have small towns and villages all over the place. Your best bet would probably be to make most of them ruins, otherwise you are going to have about a billion interior cells to make.

 

One problem I have run into is that there is a size limit for mods. This is apparently due to them using one byte (2 hex digits) for the mod number and 3 byes for the file offset to describe objects. Your maximum file offset for objects in each file is then 00FFFFFF hex, which works out to 16,277,215 bytes (roughly 16 MB). If you go beyond this, the file won't load in the GECK any more. What I have had to do for my more complex world spaces is have one esm that just has the heightmap, roads, and basic exterior objects like building and roads (things that affect the heightmap as you are laying them out). Then have a second file which adds landscape objects (trees, rocks, etc) and navmeshes. Depending on how large and complex your world space is, you may need to split off interior cells into a third file.

 

Good luck!

[SayinNuthin]

If you are doing the UK, you've really got your work cut out for you. I just took a look at the UK on google maps and the first thing that struck me is how dense everything is. I've been working on areas of Nevada and California where the population densitiy is much smaller and civilized areas are limited to small pockets spaced widely apart. The UK is just littered with tiny little towns all over the space with very little empty space between them.

 

Goes a way to explaining the hi-rez Ordinance Survey maps don't it.. Having said that a nuclear war is libel to make a bit of space :ohmy: or rather some blank ones... SonicAdam said in his thread that he wanted to base his mod in a small city called Coventry which is more or less in the middle of the country, I concur this is for the best as London isn't really in Britain, The UK belongs to London but London doesn't belong to the UK in the same way as capitols that are not 'world cities' do.

Further, as anyone who lived through the cold war will probably recall London's chances of coming out of a nuclear exchange as anything but a plain of fused glass is pretty much zero.

 

Pluses (if there's anyone out there interested in doing London) you have to go to somewhere like Rome to find a city with more going on under it. 2000 years of groundworks and tunnelling would make a nice location for a 'Metro' type mod.

[TrickyVein]

I've been making some FNV equivalents of real areas lately. While you can do what TrickyVein posted, I personally wouldn't recommend it...What I have been doing is going to google maps and clicking on satellite view to get a rough idea of the terrain, then creating a rough compressed version of that using the heightmap editor. It's more art than science

 

You prefer spending the time and going through the tribulation of creating a multi-quad heightmap by hand? How do make sure that it's perfectly rectilinear? That distances and elevations of real world locations are accurate?

 

I have trouble believing you :D

 

DEM files can be quite large, on the order of 100's of MB. The user needs to pick and choose an area from the data which is usually much smaller in size then the full extent of a decimal degree. Everything ends up getting converted into 1024x1024 RAW images anyway.

[madmongo]

Here's how I do it. I just finished the area from Indian Springs (just north of Las Vegas) to Tonopah, so I'll use that for an example.

 

The first thing I did was look at the area using google maps, looking at the roads and also at the satellite view. Once I had a rough idea of the terrain and figured out what I would be placing in my map, I went into the heightmap editor and just did a rough pass of where the mountain parts were

 

And this is why I prefer this method over your more realistic method of using actual height data. If you look at the area north of Indian Springs, there are a lot of mountainous areas and then you eventually get to a flat area around where the Groom Lake facility (aka Area 51) is located. But if you try to lay all that out realistically in the GECK, it doesn't fit into a single world space. So what I instead did was put a smaller mountainous region north of Indian Springs and then a proportionally larger flat area around Area 51, so that in-game it makes Area 51 feel more isolated from the rest of the world. Is it accurate compared to the real world? No. But it's playable as a game, and it has the basic feel of the area correct. I've got Amagosa Valley, Beatty, Goldfield, and Tonopah all along a fairly simple roadway that isn't anywhere near as complex as the real road system, but it gets the point across.

 

It took me a bit of fiddling (basically scrapping the heightmap and starting over about 3 times) to get everything in the right place. Then I made the mountains taller, added some noise to make it look more realistic, and done. Are the elevations for each town correct? No. Do the mountain peaks match the real mountain peaks in Nevada? No. What I have is a compact representation of the area designed for a game. It's much less accurate than your method, but much more playable in my opinion.

 

All of that fiddling with the heightmap took me about 3 or 4 hours in one evening. Adding the roads, towns, etc. of course takes much longer. I imagine you can do your data conversions much faster than it takes me to create a heightmap.

[TrickyVein]

...But if you try to lay all that out realistically in the GECK, it doesn't fit into a single world space. So what I instead did was put a smaller mountainous region north of Indian Springs and then a proportionally larger flat area around Area 51, so that in-game it makes Area 51 feel more isolated from the rest of the world. Is it accurate compared to the real world? No. But it's playable as a game, and it has the basic feel of the area correct.

 

This is where editing the image in Photoshop becomes important. You can stretch different areas of the heightmap to make it fit into however large an area in which you are working. Also, nobody really cares about representing realistic terrain for the sake of being realistic. It just happens to look better than anything else.

 

Have you generated terrain meshes for this worldspace which you provided as an example?

[madmongo]

No, I haven't generated terrain meshes. I'm still a bit of a newbie at this and I haven't quite figured out the LOD stuff yet. The mod is playable without it so I wasn't planning on adding that until near the end.

 

What I have so far is the worldspace I described, which is basically the area just north of Vegas up to Tonopah, a second worldspace that covers the "Big Circle", for which I am using the area from around Lake Tahoe up to Klamath Falls, and soon I will be adding a third worldspace to fill in the gap between the two areas. I originally wasn't going to have the third area but I was poking around on google maps and found a lot of things that I think I can turn into interesting game locations.

 

So basically I started out wanting to do the area around New Reno and got carried away with it. When I'm done you'll basically be able to go from New Vegas all the way up to Gecko and Klamath and everywhere in between.

 

The exterior of the first area is pretty much done. All of the buildings, roads, and structures are in place. I still have to add landscape objects like trees, etc. and add clutter, and do the navmeshing. I had the Big Circle area done, but I didn't like the way parts of it came out so I'm currently re-doing that. Once that's done I'll do the third worldspace and then move on to interiors, quests, etc.

 

I also have an incomplete Mohave Valley area, which is basically the area south of Searchlight in FNV. I am going to concentrate on the above areas first, but eventually I'd like to add the Mohave Valley and some areas west of FNV like the Hub and Junktown.