TUTORIAL Race Track Builder - Inject elevation data and terrain texture

[Les Neilson]

Ah, this is good news! I was just looking for info on reading geotiff files....

 

[Les Neilson]

Now here's a challenge... I've found a source for lidar data for the entire Isle of Man. My Snaefell Mountain Course track might be due for a major update... I'll open a new thread here once I have some more details and can have a good look at the data.

 

[Les Neilson]

So now I'm working on a plugin for RTB to read the data directly. So far the main problem is reading in the colossal amount of data... Each block is 4000 x 4000 points covering 2km square (50cm resolution) and anything up to 400MB each, and there are 188 of them at the last count.

 

[Pixelchaser]

So now I'm working on a plugin for RTB to read the data directly. So far the main problem is reading in the colossal amount of data... Each block is 4000 x 4000 points covering 2km square (50cm resolution) and anything up to 400MB each, and there are 188 of them at the last count.

making progress at all Les ?

 

[Les Neilson]

Hey, good to hear from you!

Yeah, progress, not bad at all. I've got a test app which figures out the right data file to open, and reads out the height data correctly. Just finished running through another conversion of the source files into the right format, this time to 3 decimal places (mm), rather than 17 (!) originally. I eventually worked out it was QGIS that was doing that in the conversion process.

A few things still to do:
Work out how to do some simple error checking (if a data file doesn't exist for example). I'm starting from scratch learning C#...
Figure out how to do some data caching, though I'll probably skip that to begin with and cope with how slow it'll be, at least when starting a new project.
Still to try building the prototype into the RTB template and see what happens (or doesn't)

In the meantime I'm already thinking about how to make it more generically compatible with other data I already have. In theory any UK data should work...

 

[Pixelchaser]

how do you deal with trees though ?

btw..Remember way back and you could extend the coverage of the project in general, can you still do that in a plugin ?

 

[Les Neilson]

Hmmm, not sure what you mean about trees... this just handles terrain data. Everything works as normal in RTB, only difference is where the height numbers are coming from.

 

[Woodee]

Hmmm, not sure what you mean about trees... this just handles terrain data. Everything works as normal in RTB, only difference is where the height numbers are coming from.

Probably means the difference in DTM and DSM data? One is just terrain.... the other is everything including trees.

 

[Les Neilson]

Ah, okay! I'll be using DTM, although DSM is also available. I tend to think dtm is more relevant for generating terrain although the post processing that gets used for removing stuff can be hit or miss. I'd still rather not have to do it myself...

 

[Pixelchaser]

yeah, you dont want that trees data. i was under assumption the uk data in high resolution was just the basic all in one. i know there will be older simple terrain data etc....yeah filtering it in any way would be just futile. so there is hi res basic terrain available for this malarkey ? very out of touch with most stuff at the moment I am. and the memory is a sieve

 

[Woodee]

yeah, you dont want that trees data. i was under assumption the uk data in high resolution was just the basic all in one. i know there will be older simple terrain data etc....yeah filtering it in any way would be just futile. so there is hi res basic terrain available for this malarkey ? very out of touch with most stuff at the moment I am. and the memory is a sieve

From the UK website I used, there is both available.

https://environment.data.gov.uk/DefraDataDownload/?Mode=survey

 

[Pixelchaser]

so DTM is terrain and DSM is surface data... feel silly not knowing that, was it always there ?

 

[Les Neilson]

Yes, both types are available as well as point cloud. I've just noticed there's a phase 3 for scotland that I didn't know about. In serious danger of getting sidetracked now...

Lots of east lothian and borders... Jim Clark rally time!

 

[Les Neilson]

Okay, so I've got a basic prototype plugin working, with Brendon's help. It's very slow at the moment, so I need to unpack some of the stuff that's being done by a Visual Studio addon package. But the source code for it is available, so it should be fairly simple to add in. I should be clear that you still need to do a bit of work to sort out data files to use this; changing file formats and renaming the data files so that the plugin knows where to find stuff. But I think the results will be good enough... I'll try to post some screenshots soon

 

[Les Neilson]

Good news! The plugin is now working pretty well. It's producing everything Wurstkoffer's hack produced without the need for xampp, geoserver etc etc. As I said in my last post, it still needs a bit of work on the data files for now, but with some work I might find a way to simplify it. It only works for UK data, because it's based around a conversion of lat/long coordinates to OSGB grid references

 

[Pixelchaser]

So... did Brendon help or was he as useful as a chocolate tea cup ?

btw have you seen the bing map data in flightsim20 yet ? i flew around the eiger last night. fucking marvellous if i may say so... maybe we grab data from FS game next

but lets face it, we be driving the whole world very very soon guys.

 

[Les Neilson]

Oh yes, he rewrote a piece of code for me that speeded everything up by at least ten times. I needed to add a few more lines myself after doing a bit more research, but now it seems pretty much spot on.

And rest assured I'll be downloading MSFS as soon as I can find enough disk space for it...

 

[Les Neilson]

Still bug fixing my plugin. It works beautifully on smallish areas where I can manage with a single datafile. If I need to load in new files it tends to get into a loop which it can't get out of. There's also a separate project being done by a norwegian guy to read geotiffs, which is good news

 

[Les Neilson]

Hey Ali, how's it going? I've been meaning to ask if I could pick your brain about something... You remember when I was doing that little loop in the Yorkshire dales called Glaisdale? At a certain point I discovered I had a mesh with too many triangles to process in kseditor, and you did some magic with it so that it would work. Can I ask how you did that? I know you use 3dsmax, and I imagine there's some mesh optimisation stuff in there. I was wondering about the workflow... I assume the modification is applied to the terrain mesh only, right? And it would need to be reapplied any time the project is updated in RTB, right?

 

[Pixelchaser]

no... the problem was either your one continuous road, so i split it up. or maybe scenery was split through max too. but that's all, just object separation adhering to the limits.

i doubt rtb will let you work in chunks like would be good for kseditor. but i duno. not best pleased with the rtb dev and his program these dats. he got quite nasty online recently after being proven just how lacking in knowledge he is about the actual game engine.