Hi,
I work for a large metropolitan Fire Service in England, UK.
We were recently given some terrain data to have a play with (x,y and altitude) that covers our entire Fire Brigade area.
We’ve got some cool ideas what we can do with this stuff (calculating where chemicals will “run off” if dropped, flooding visualisations, 3D views of major sites, 3D tracking of fire trucks etc.) but we’ve only a small amount of 3D programming experience.
So… we’ve got a massive grid of 10,800 x 7200 points (which equates to a height measurement taken for every 5m square in our Brigade area).
For each point I get an indication of if it is grass/road/water/building etc as well, which might make things look even better. In the future I can get the floor plans and heights for all the buildings, but I think that might be getting ahead of myself...I’ll stick with just trying to generate some terrain for now!
I would like to retain as much of this “5 metre resolution” as possible around the camera so we can accurately model the chemical run-off as mentioned earlier. But as well I would like to be able to generate much bigger LOD-based landscapes as well for other applications.
Has anyone got any suggestions about how to get going with rendering a huge terrain like this? After reading plenty of threads in these forums I’m not too sure what the best way forward is. I think I’ll need the works… not sure of the terms, but shading, shadows, alpha-blending (is it?) etc… most importantly - not an insurmountable learning curve!
I’ve settled on Blitz3D as my weapon of choice for knocking up prototypes and quick apps (and I really enjoyed BB on the Amiga and fancied get back into it!). We have very little budget, and our PC’s are “reasonable”, but certainly not state-of-the-art game machines.
Any suggestions about a suitable engine (that is really easy to get going in Blitz3D!) or even any general tips would be really appreciated.
Thanks for your time.
Tim
I work for a large metropolitan Fire Service in England, UK.
We were recently given some terrain data to have a play with (x,y and altitude) that covers our entire Fire Brigade area.
We’ve got some cool ideas what we can do with this stuff (calculating where chemicals will “run off” if dropped, flooding visualisations, 3D views of major sites, 3D tracking of fire trucks etc.) but we’ve only a small amount of 3D programming experience.
So… we’ve got a massive grid of 10,800 x 7200 points (which equates to a height measurement taken for every 5m square in our Brigade area).
For each point I get an indication of if it is grass/road/water/building etc as well, which might make things look even better. In the future I can get the floor plans and heights for all the buildings, but I think that might be getting ahead of myself...I’ll stick with just trying to generate some terrain for now!
I would like to retain as much of this “5 metre resolution” as possible around the camera so we can accurately model the chemical run-off as mentioned earlier. But as well I would like to be able to generate much bigger LOD-based landscapes as well for other applications.
Has anyone got any suggestions about how to get going with rendering a huge terrain like this? After reading plenty of threads in these forums I’m not too sure what the best way forward is. I think I’ll need the works… not sure of the terms, but shading, shadows, alpha-blending (is it?) etc… most importantly - not an insurmountable learning curve!
I’ve settled on Blitz3D as my weapon of choice for knocking up prototypes and quick apps (and I really enjoyed BB on the Amiga and fancied get back into it!). We have very little budget, and our PC’s are “reasonable”, but certainly not state-of-the-art game machines.
Any suggestions about a suitable engine (that is really easy to get going in Blitz3D!) or even any general tips would be really appreciated.
Thanks for your time.
Tim