Updated the top post with a download URL for anyone brave enough to test! The OSM building footprint data came with mercator scale error, abandoned that idea, using LINZ building footprint data instead (which is apparently better than OSM/Google maps data anyway!). The buildings are simply polygons draped onto the DEM and extruded upwards 4.20 meters to form polyhedra. Known issues with this release: No materials/textures on buildings yet. Just testing FPS/performance with them at this stage. Road is a bit dodgy in places. There are gaps between the LiDAR sections, and the terrain underneath needs re-contouring to flatten the edges. No AI path, no track map and no replay cameras yet.
Some trees and shelter-belts have been growing from official NZ topographic map data: This is just points and polylines emitting various trees with the particle system, need to drape the forest area polygons onto the DEM properly now, and grow some actual forests!
Yep! You need map layer data in ESRI Shapefile format (.shp), or something that is supported by QGIS (and then export is as a shapefile). There's surely other ways, but the overview of the process I used is like this: Crop out the data in QGIS and export as separate shapefiles depending on data type (points, polylines and polygons). Import shapefile to blender with blenderGIS. Set the elevation source to the DEM object. Tidy up imported meshes and drape onto DEM. (Only really necessary for polygons/areas). Add some trees, and create a group for them (Ctrl-G) Add particle systems to imported objects. Configure particle system to emit random, or weighted-random trees from the group. When importing point-type Shapefiles you get a single vertex for each point, so I applied the Particle system to the object, configured to emit from the vertices to 'grow' the trees. The shelter-belt data was polylines which created vertices and edges, I needed to clean these up a little by 'removing doubles' and using alt-m to merge some near vertices. Then I converted to a curve, subdivided, and used the particle system to emit trees from the vertices. For forest area polygons, the imported object looks like this: These polygons (and the other imported shapes) are not actually exported. They are used as the surface from where the trees are 'grown'. But they didn't fit onto the DEM, making trees grow in the air, so I used a modifier stack to triangulate, subdivide and shrinkwrap the polygons onto it. Then I added a particle system to emit trees as 'hair' from the faces. I followed this guide here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/40270/how-to-make-forest-with-different-types-of-trees The topo map layers have species info which helps to plant them by type, I'm told the council has height data and number of laterals! Here are some 'exotic coniferous' trees (pinus radiata was introduced to NZ) with a shelter-belt visible on the left:
This technique could work even without map layer data, by using QGIS to draw forested-area polygons over satellite photos. The particle system settings I used are like this: Then to actually export the trees, you need to 'make duplicates real' and join them together into one object. With multiple tree types, select each type by material and separate as a new object.
Just a wee update! Finally got around to playing with the ksMultilayer_fresnel_nm shader! But I need to do something to blend the edges still. And we have cattle-stops now!
An update with good and bad news. On Friday (NZ time) I was working on down-sampling and decimating a LiDAR DSM to try and make the view of Christchurch more beautiful, when I heard the news about a terrorist attack in the city now the terror threat level is high, police helicopters are patrolling 24/7, and I live by the airport but it is eerily quiet... I wasn't even sure if I would use the DSM (as well as the DEM) because it's a lot of vertices for a 'background' but there are more than 50 victims so far, and I want Christchurch to be remembered as a beautiful city, so I will keep it in their memory. Some of the victims worked in IT too. This update replaces a section of the 30m Jaxa/ALOS (stereo-optic) DSM with a 1m (LiDAR) DSM resampled down to 4m and draped with 4m orthophotos, to try and keep a pixel-colour/vertex relationship. Christchurch is very flat, but from the hills all of it is visible. So instead of placing buildings onto a DEM, the DSM is perfect because it shows the heights of buildings and trees, without the extra vertices of separate objects and shader invocations. It seems to perform OK and the vertical accuracy/confidence is still pretty good at 0.20m (95%):
Your track surface is looking really nice @barf It really feels like its come a long way since only just a couple of weeks ago. I guess having such a huge area to cover changes the scope /approach to everything. Very nice! And yes the whole world is watching and is shocked by the insanity of what recently happened in NZ.
@Prototype I hope Christchurch can be known for it's great roads and motorsport instead of awful things like that.. and I probably should have started with something smaller Most of my time seems to be spent re-contouring the DEM. Being LiDAR it contains residual remnants of surface features, and acute terrain angles are smoothed out, meanwhile some flat and open areas are driveable raw. Would love to find a better way, it's simple enough just time consuming, by using elevation, plan and auxillary views to craft contour lines with blender's knife tool, then manipulating them into position to create road edges, flattening with looptools, then shrinkwrapping and subdividing a smooth surface suitable onto it. It's a similar process to the original prison labour used to make some of the road I guess
Sorry for what happened in NZ . I know that weird, quiet feeling after.. my wife was in Paris few years back when it happened there.
yeah RIP Zealanders. I do have to say, Try not to believe the Television. its no where near as simple as it has been made out. Terrorism crossed to your states for sure. but you don't have terrorism issues. given your national border laws which means its political. a new playground that has to start somewhere. and yeah NZ just got tarnished with the rest of the worlds politics for that im sorry. I always referred to NZ as probably the last Bastion regards this. I think someone else thought the very same thing and decided to change that. tarnish that.
UPDATE: Progress is slow but steady, mostly road surface work ahead now, after that more road-side foliage and re-doing the native trees (NZ native trees are a bit different to the boiler-plate european trees I used). Contouring the DEM and shrink-wrapping/subdividing the road surface to it is (still) taking most of the time apparently it might look good enough but road feeling is my #1 priority... and my G27 accelerator pedal's variable resistor broke so I can't test it. About 5km to the east of evans pass remains, although the road west from evans pass is 90-something percent done and fun to drive. To try and bring the goal-posts closer and actually release something, I've made a layout using a section of the road where a hill-climb event is held and started placing rally control signs etc on it. I have this terrible habit of starting projects but not finishing them, and I want this one to be different!
up to about armco version 2.5 now. still some issues to resolve but made them 3d objects with volume instead of textured planes now. i figure i can get away with the extra vertices, because there isn't much armco anyway... one of the reasons it's such a dangerous road Also I put the pacific ocean in! I have this masochistic aversion to using tessellating textures, we shouldn't need them with the texture memory available these days, so I found a 10m/pixel orthoimagery set that went offshore far enough to make the horizon, and textured a sea-level plane with that. Ends up costing another ~70mb of .kn5 files but I think I can halve that by using a NPOT texture. And NPOT textures have no performance impact that I can measure. And on that success I've started contouring the last few kilometers of the DEM, from Evans Pass to Godley Head. It's the road hugging the mountain here:
Bro you got me all hyped up with this amazing project of yours. I've silently started working on an industrial track, so thanks for the additional fuel PS: it's great to be back in the forum, cheers!
