[Opensim-users] Real life heightmaps in opensim.

[Marcus Llewellyn]

I've created terrain from real-life elevation data. It's something that
really deserves a proper how-to, but I'll try to sketch the main points out
here.

First thing you need is the real life data. For 90 meter resolution data for
much of the planet, you can go to http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/. For future
reference, it's also possible to find data at a 30m resolution, but so far
as I know it's only available for select parts of the United States at
http://seamless.usgs.gov . Both sites offer the data in the form of a
GeoTIFF file, and that's what you'll need. Neither site is particularly user
friendly, so be prepared to poke at it for a while.

Once you have that, you'll want to go and download a program called L3DT
from http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ . There is a free version of this
program available there, and it can import a GeoTIFF and convert it into a
greyscale heightmap suitable for OpenSim. It supports saving as a r32 file,
which you can load into an OpenSim region from the console.

Obviously, there's lots of little steps I haven't described. Happily,
Bundysoft has a tutorial on turning a GeoTiff into terrain. It even shows
you how to get the data you'll need. You can find it here:
http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tutorials:l3dt:srtm

If you follow that tutorial, you should get pretty close. All you'll need to
do is export the L3DT heightmap to r32 files sliced to 256x256 pixels in
size, and then load each one into the appropriate OpenSim region with the
console.
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