Great job figuring out the raster system, its so simple. I just ran a map through using your technique and it turned out fine. My only challenge was scaling it to meters; pretty sure my LIDAR data is all in feet. The bumpiness you noticed is from the LIDAR, which has some inherent Z-noise. I get those bumps even with my LIDAR meshes which are generated directly from the point cloud. Ive added the height map steps to the main page. Thanks marcus awesome work!
I don't have much experience, but i'd guess its very similar. Also since your new, you may want to check the dates on treads before responding.
Sorry, I tried to find a newer post. And it's not the same because I keep getting stuck, on the active option under scalar fields in CC it keeps giving me the options of "band#1 Gray" or nothing. I can make it partway through but cannot complete the extract ground points part
Hi Andrew, Im a mapaholic so you came to the right place hehe. GIS data is tricky to work with some times and it seems every type of elevation data requires a different workflow to get from its raw form to a PNG height map suitable for import into BeamNG. I'm pretty sure ASTER is a DEM (a raster image of elevation) and isn't point cloud based, so its not applicable to this tutorial. I typically load DEMs into QGIS and hope for the best. Id recommend acquiring or converting to TIF format and loading that into L3DT, which has tools for scaling and cropping to something that's importable. My last experiment was the popular lookout at the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, its on protected land and there's little data available and I had to edit the sparse data I found quite a bit to get something usable. L3DT was the tool that made it possible, and all the over GIS programs aren't geared for this type of task. I only use these complex methods for very high resolution data and locations that don't have much data available. As far as Global ASTER is concerned the resolution is very low and your better off going to https://terrain.party/ Its very user friendly map server and you can usually even get a visual satellite/map image from the web page by screen-shotting the map location. Topography is a whole different beast and B25Mitch covered it pretty well in his tutorial, which goes hand in hand with this one. https://www.beamng.com/threads/tutorial-map-in-a-month.49287/
Thank you so much for the advice, I'll try that software tomorrow. Would you say that GMTED, GTOPO, or SRTM are any better than ASTER? I'm trying to start out simple with an island in southeast Asia, but at some point I want to create a map of Gibraltar airport given that the runway is intersected by a highway (I think setting up a race scenario and some aircraft that take off would be nice, if that's possible)
So, I have terrain data from terrain.party, and through playing around I discovered that I can export it as a mesh in L3DT. Not sure if I want to do that without extracting ground points but I also don't know how. Also should I use one of the resources on Earth explorer to get texture data? Sorry I'm such a noob, this is quite new to me but also exciting.
i am wanting to get started with map making but when i select "digital elevation" there is no LIDAR option. any help with this?
