[Opensim-users] Real life heightmaps in opensim.

[Jeroen van Veen]

On Tuesday 10 August 2010 16:56:11 Marcus Llewellyn wrote:
> 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.
I wonder whether it's possible to automate heightmap processing for a certain 
region inworld. I'm using a mapping tool for 
opensim(http://hwios.org/wiki/OSMaps) which adds an opensim maplayer on top of 
openstreetmap. I don't see any geographical reference system in the heightmap 
files that are available on http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/ , so i suspect it 
won't be possible to process a piece of heightmap between two coordinates?

kind regards,

Jeroen