World Elevation Data (the easy way)

[Gabriel Bakker]

MicroDEM no longer seems to work, or at least, I cannot find any posts on the internet of anyone using it successfully since 2010.

So, to make it easy in case anybody is still making maps for this game, I found and edited a map of the world in greyscale, that should work for making maps of anywhere based on real world data. And all you need is your image editor of choice (i use Gimp as its free and open source and easy to use).

Its not perfect yet, and I may make improvements to it as time goes on.

All you need to do to make a map from real world data is:
1) Download the giant image file here: http://www.sageax.com/downloads/WorldEl ... yscale.tga
2) Open it in your image program of choice.
3) Copy the section of it that you want to make your map out of and paste it into a new window in your image editing program of choice.
4) Resize/Scale it to the size you need for your map.
5) Adjust the elevation by adjusting the levels (in Gimp you use the "Color" menu, and choose "Levels") Here you can adjust what color it makes the brightest white (tallest mountain) and what color it makes the darkest black (underwater) and everything in between. There are lots of tutorials on the web for adjusting the levels of an image, and its the easiest way to adjust the height of the mountains, and the steepness of the cliffs and where the water level is.
6) Copy and paste this finished greyscale height-map into the top square of your railroads map tga file.

Enjoy!!
Gabriel

PS. I apologize in advance if I posted this in the wrong forum. This seemed to be the only place that made sense, but feel free to move it if you wish.

[Gabriel Bakker]

PPS .. if anyone manages to make a better one and would like me to host it, PM me and we'll figure out a way to send it over and i'll replace the one above with yours.

Ideally, it should be around 30,000 pixels wide, and 15,000 pixels tall. Mount Everest should be white, oceans should be mostly black, and coastlines should be well defined. (The one above has problems with some of the coast lines in some places, and also is not as high of a resolution as I would have hoped, and it shows strange islands that i'm pretty sure don't exist in real life.)

[snoopy55]

http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/ ... crodem.htm

Try that. The forum contains posts from this year and the latest version is 64-bit.

[Gabriel Bakker]

I downloaded and installed the 64 bit version, It runs, but when I try to open a DEM from the post in the other thread, it still says "invalid DEM". I was able to open a GeoTIFF that i'd found the other day, but I couldn't figure out how to do anything with it, plus, it seemed to do strange things.. The tallest Mountains were light grey, the low flat planes were pure white, deep ocean was black (as it should be) but shallow ocean was the same light grey as the tallest mountains were. So, if I adjusted it and loaded it in SMR, it would likely show the mountains as deep chasms .. but then, that could be another cool way to do an "Alternative Universe" map ... Himalayas Alternative Universe, where all the mountains are inverted!

The TGA I posted above, needs its coastlines cleaned up, then I think it will work, though I'd prefer a higher resolution, and I don't have more time to mess with it just now to clean up the coastlines.

I did find an interesting greyscale elevation map of Antarctica, stripped of its ice, and modified to have the oceans rise. It was supposed to be Antarctica after Global Warming melts its Ice .. It was part of somebodies college thesis project. I was thinking of doing another sci-fi map based on it.

Gabriel

[seawolf6572]

I had the same problem with microdem. I could load individual DEM's that I downloaded from the National Map Viewer only if it was gridfloat type. However, I couldn't merge DEM's. I tried the 32 bit version, upgraded to 64 bit, uninstalled and tried again. It would never allow merge.
The DEM data for my SAVRR required four DEM's. Since I couldn't merge them, I saved each as an image, and loaded them into paintshop. Then I pasted each quadrant onto a new image as layers. This next part is what sucked. Adjusting each images grayscale levels to match one another while keeping water dark enough and beaches gentle. Finally, airbrushing the joints of the quadrants because it's never perfect.
Anyone who can successfully merge DEM's with the current versions of microdem, 32 or 64 bit, please post a step-by-step. Or, if anyone knows of other free software to merge DEM's that would be great.