Creating Terrain from Real World Data

Development World Creation
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Hello,

I’m trying to create a terrain/scenery library that could be used for simulators and other types of games using SRTM data.

SRTM data explained here: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ … it’s basically a height map in many formats, but I want to use geotiff.

This is my first “major” 3D project and I’m not exactly sure on how to go about this in the sense of setting up a “tile system” so that eventually an entire world of scenery can be scaled and used for any “size” world.

I have google this exhaustively and found many pieces to the puzzle, but could really use some experienced help to put together a workflow and better understand the architecture behind Unreal Engine 4 so that I could package this terrain/scenery in a way that could be used by a small FPS map or a simulator like Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Any insight is much appreciated!

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Join the question too

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Wow, this would be hugely beneficial to our project. Are you doing this as part of a big project or just for fun / learning? I could pair you up with our lead on this if it interests you.

We are doing spherical coordinates though, and might be using some data from the USGS from space targets too.

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World Machine

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This is the site i use for getting real world landscape (not sure if this helps or answers your question at all). I usually just download the file (carefull how much land you select it will download some huge images if you ask it to) http://gdex.cr.usgs.gov/gdex/

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I usually download it as a png, then put it in world machine, smooth it out, give it a bit of erosion, etc. it works out pretty good. Obviously that was a terrible example doing an island, but ive used it to map out the korengal valley in afghanistan for a project and it was spot on.