Day 7

For the last couple of days, I’ve been busy keeping myself glued to the Hawk Tracking SPOT map, watching the Uvalde WGC unfold.  Man is that addictive – just can’t stop watching the races, pulling for my teams (U.S. plus Canada plus Baud Litt plus Wiktor Kozlik).  Also, I have been avoiding the Scenery Adventure because I was stuck due to missing ‘strata1.bmp’ and ‘Topo_Map.tgw’ files.

In the meantime though, I have gotten a couple of replies to my earlier posts, both here and on the Condor forums, and so I am taking another shot at making some progress.  I did another search of the Condor forums, and found the original post series by ASH33M when he was creating the video tutorial series based on the Crete scenery.  In that series of posts, I found that he had uploaded the ‘strata.bmp’, ‘strata1.bmp’, and ‘Topo_Map.tgw’ files as part of the series, so maybe I’m back in business.  When I started this adventure, I just started with the ‘Video Tutorials’ topic, and that topic didn’t include the side conversations or the files, so that’s how I got lost in the first place.  In particular, the contents of the following post would sure have saved me some time (“the 3 files…” comment refers to strata.bmp, strata1.bmp, and Topo_Map.tgw): ;-)

 

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Create another Terragen folder and call this Terragen_Topo and copy all your Terragen files into this new folder and also the 3 files that I have made available within this thread.

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OK, so back to work.  I created a ‘Terragen_Topo’ folder, copied into it all the .ter files from my current ‘Terragen’ folder, and then copied the 3 magic files into it as well.   Then I started up the Terragen_Topo video and…

Launched Terragen, and then navigated to and ‘Open’ed Topo_Map.tgw.  This gave me an error message about not being able to find ‘strata.bmp’ file – Ack!  Fortunately, in my earlier travels through all the scenery-related posts, I saw another user who had the same problem, and the reply – “Just hit OK and then select the ‘strata.bmp’ file in the resultant dialog”.  That did the trick for me, too (and the identical error for ‘strata1.bmp’) – Yay!

So, it appears that the ‘Topo_Map.tgw’ file somehow incorporates a link to the ‘strata’ files.  Looking at Topo_Map.tgw in TextPad, I see it is a binary file (I HATE binary configuration files!!!!), but the ascii strings ‘strata.bmp’ and ‘strata1.bmp’ are present, confirming that the .tgw file does indeed incorporate references to these files.

Also, it appears that ‘Topo_Map.tgw’ has some internal options preset, and rather than go through those settings, ASH33M elected to simply provide the .tgw and dependent strata files to others.  As the following screenshot shows,  I opened the ‘New Surface’ layer for edit, and found the reference to the strata bitmaps by clicking on ‘Tex’ (Texture mapping?) and then double-clicking on ‘Strata Overlay’ (If you hover the mouse over ‘Strata Overlay’, a helpful hint “Lists the plugins currently applied.  Double-clicking a plugin name will open the plugin’s settings editor” will appear).  So, it looks like ‘SO Strata Overlay’ is a plugin (from SoPack, presumably) being used for this purpose.  Maybe that explains an earlier post that talked about multiple .TGW files, each with a different SoPack plugin – don’t know.

Following the video a little farther…..  Aha!!  From the video I now see that ‘strata.bmp’ is used for the SO Overlay in the ‘New Surface’ layer, while ‘strata1.bmp’ is used for the SO Overlay for the ‘Base Surface”  (this is distinct from the ‘Rock Base’ layer).  Don’t know what significance this has…. yet!  Looking at the two bitmaps together, I see some differences, but nothing that I would call earth-shaking, so one wonders why the big deal using two.  Perhaps all will be revealed later…

 

In the Terragen_Topo video (http://www.vimeo.com/8584046), ASH33M picks a tile at random for the first processing run, but I want to try to hit the tile containing the CCSC airport.  The airport is at 39.41, -84.11, so I *think* that should be in tile 3985 – we’ll see.  Hmm, that didn’t work worth a damn – the tiles I have are named ‘0000.ter’ to ‘1009.ter’ – obviously a different ordering system than the one I was expecting.  So, I went back to the Landscape Editor, selected the Caesar Creek landscape, and finally figured out the numbering system (there is a helpful readout on the bottom of the screen, as shown in the following image).

Landscape editor showing CCSC airport, with Terragen tile number 0302 readout at bottom of screen

Of course, luck would have it that my CCSC airport just happens to cross the boundary between 0302 and 0402, but at least most of it is in 0302.

OK, back to Terragen to synch up with the video.  Hmm, can’t seem to find the same setup as before – I opened Topo_Map.tgw, but now the ‘Rock Base’ layer doesn’t show the reference to Strata1.bmp as it did before – what happened?  aha!  The problem was that the edits done before were to ‘New Surface’ and its associated ‘Base Surface’,  but *not* to the ‘Rock Base’ parent layer.  What I saw before was an edit to the ‘Base Surface’,  *not* ‘Rock Base’.  Confused yet? ;-).

Anyway, back to the video.  I selected tile 0302 for rendering, and selected 1024 x 1024 for image size – FAIL!  Turns out this is too large for the unregistered version of Terragen.  So, I went to the Terragen website (http://planetside.co.uk) to see what it would cost me to register – $99 USD, ouch!!.  So I decided to cut the image size down to 512 x 512 as many others with the unregistered version have done – this won’t be the best in the world, but it will be faster and that way I can get through all my mistakes quicker! ;-).

OK, so image size set to 512 x 512, and click on Render Image – the tile was rendered in about 5 seconds using my Dell Precision M6300 laptop with 3.5GB RAM, as shown in the following image.  This is real good news, as it means I can work my way through all the tiles pretty quickly – yay!

 

Tile 0302 Rendered

Tile 0302 Rendered

 

Well, the rendered image isn’t very interesting, but what do you expect when dealing with a real terrain where the highest thing around for miles and miles is an interstate overpass!  Actually, there *is* some interesting terrain – the rendered image shows the Little Miami river valley on the far left-hand side of the tile (just to the west of the CCSC airport.  This valley is about 100-200 feet lower than the typical 900′ msl (+/-) of most of the state of Ohio.

According to the video tutorial, the idea now is to do the same thing for all of the tiles, and then put them somewhere – I’m not really sure about that part.  ASH33M says that they should go in the Terragen folder, but I’m not really sure I’m hearing that correctly.  Anyway, this is enough for now – I’ll figure that part out tomorrow ;-).

 

 

 

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