Just a thread on terrain importing rather than continue to be off-topic in Daz's thread. Posts below extracted from that thread. Hoping the authors are fine with that.
I have two fictional designs mapped out and drawn to scale on paper. One I actually posted to Linkscorner about 8 months ago just to gain feedback and whether I should attempt in APCD but I decided against it because so much depended on using the real plot of land I had chosen and it's true elevations. This for me was always tricky in APCD and honestly what I'm looking forward to most in CF. For me the terrain importer is going to be a make or break tool because I personally find it fascinating to create a fictional course on an already existing piece of land with real world issues like sharp elevation, ledge, signature trees, and water issues.
I am also very proficient in Photoshop which is great, and have tried doing height maps and course maps and such in there.
I don't see the terrain importer as being the issue for what you want, rather the availability of fine enough elevation detail without the course being locally mapped for elevation.
I thought I'd start becoming familiar with Unity tonight by bringing my local course into it via Bing Maps. I couldn't find it documented how often Bing sampled elevation, but it seems like every 30m is pretty typical in unpopulated areas (this is a unpopulated country area in Australia).
So I sampled elevation every 30m. I was thinking later every 15m might have been optimal, but I don't think the difference would be earth shattering.
You can see from below it's good enough to get the general lay of the land, but I'm going to miss those smaller swales and green undulations.
Nice work, shimonko..
I have gotten many Dems from the USGS site for REAL Courses in the past and we were only able to use Google Earth which IMO never had as good a resolution as Bing Maps. So this is a plus..
However, we never really could see undulations on the greens and fairways and you can't with Bing Maps either. Mostly what the Terrain Importer(that was developed by the Tiger Woods community) gave you was the rough elevations and then you do the terrain work for each hole from what you can see in photos etc. if there available.. Shape the greens, the bunkers, the fairways etc yourself.
Of course, this is a all new system so maybe we will be able to get better Dems, that would sure save a lot of work.. So that when you import the Dem into Unity, it may have the greens as there are on the course, without having to shape/add undulations or elevations to much, yourself...
We always had to flatten this, smooth that, raise this and so on.. Which was a fun part of designing also.. So I hope it isn't all automatic..lol
And since the USGS site has changed how you get Dems, I don't know... Not sure if we will still have to use them to get the elevations or not, if we do, we can email them and they will tell us how to get Dems now, as they have told me before but it was kind of complicated for me.. Now the Dems come in many chunks, not just 1, like they used to. But it is doable.
I am impressed though, from what you have accomplished so far...
Looking forward to all this...
Hope I didn't go to far off course/thread...
USGS now has downloads available for much of the US at 3m or 10m intervals. Terrain importer will take these files overhead and elevation and give u a height map and ortho rectified image that aligns to it. Many of the courses we have built have come from free 1m data.
Nice. I guess I can't be too disappointed by Australia's (2011!) 30m data as it seems most other places in the world only have 90m data.
