wantafanta 13 Posted February 23, 2015 so ive run into a few problems i thought some of you pro's on the forums could help me out with. currently working on a 40960m x 40960m map with 1m/pixel resoloution for the satelite imagery. still not sure if i should reduce the resoloution by half or if that will end up working out ok in game but like at the moment ive been waiting for 3 hours and terrain builder has yet to fully import the .PNG.. i know TB processes png's slower so is it going to give me issues if i use a different format for my sat imagery? can i cut it into tiles and import each individually in terrain builder? or does it need to be one single image? and my final question is, if anyone knows of a good method for exporting terrains for painting in mudbox or mari that they could share it would be appreciated. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
badluckburt 78 Posted February 23, 2015 No idea if it will work in-game sizewise but you can definitely cut up a satellite image and import it in pieces, just make sure to give each tile the right coordinates. PNGs are hell to import, only the BI gods know why, as far as I know there's nothing 'weird' about the image format itself. I've stuck with BMPs after my first experience of staring at the progress bar for 2 hours. If you were to convert yours to BMP, be warned that the filesize(s) will be massive. The import is fast though. I'm not familiar with mudbox or mari so I can't help you with those, I just thought I'd chip in on the PNG part. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 46 Posted February 23, 2015 (edited) ive been waiting for 3 hours and terrain builder has yet to fully import the .PNG.. i know TB processes png's slower so is it going to give me issues if i use a different format for my sat imagery? Try .bmp or .tif - As long as the file is about 2gb or under it should load no problem and either of these two formats are at least 10x faster to import.... can i cut it into tiles and import each individually in terrain builder? or does it need to be one single image? Yes you can! - 4 x 20480x20480's would probably be easier to handle - I'm quite surprised you managed to create a single image of 40960x40960 in the first place! TB doesn't care if it's one image or four - you can load them one at a time, then right click the individual "tiles" in the Rasters Layers manager list and simply offset the coordinates to "arrange" them back into your 2x2 grid, so it looks like one big image again. EG: - Image split into a 2x2 grid - labelled BL, BR, TL & TR - for Bottom Left, Bottom Right, etc, etc BL - 200000 E, 0 N BR - 200000+20480 E, 0 N TL - 2000000 E, 20480 N TR - 200000+20480 E, 20480N When you get to the Generating Layers stage - TB will "sample" the four images as if it were one big one... You can export your "mapframe heightfield" from TB in "Arc ASCII" format (.arc) - not sure if either of those programs will accept an .asc directly, but you could then maybe further convert the .asc to something they can handle - plain ascii grid .xyz maybe, or .DXF - thats a common format... B Edited February 23, 2015 by Bushlurker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
wantafanta 13 Posted February 23, 2015 I'm quite surprised you managed to create a single image of 40960x40960 in the first place! well as an indexed color PNG its only 228mb. as an RGB 8 bit Png the file is much larger.. i have very little to no performance issues working on 20480x20480 images in photoshop, but any larger and there is visual lag in my brush strokes. so do i not need the line in my layers.cfg pointing towards my sat texture? (satelliteMap="sat_lco.png";) or do i need to use multiple lines to define each tile? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 46 Posted February 24, 2015 so do i not need the line in my layers.cfg pointing towards my sat texture? (satelliteMap="sat_lco.png" or do i need to use multiple lines to define each tile? Don't worry about that line - much like the old "mco" line, I think that "sat_lco.png" line is probably redundant now, but might still need to be present - just load in the images and offset them via Coordinates until they're arranged properly. When you generate the layers, TB just samples what it "sees" within the mapframe you've defined and treats it as if it were a single image, whether its multiple gridded tiles, overlapping images - pictures of your cat... whatever.... B Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
wantafanta 13 Posted February 24, 2015 (edited) thankyou very much for the help! i assume the same goes for the mask image. BMP import is much faster, only a few mins per tile (1.2gb tiles) Edited February 24, 2015 by wantafanta Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
badluckburt 78 Posted February 24, 2015 thankyou very much for the help! i assume the same goes for the mask image. BMP import is much faster, only a few mins per tile (1.2gb tiles) Yep, that is correct. The upside of BMP files btw, if you zip them up after you're done with them, they take up a lot less space in case that becomes a problem for you. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
wantafanta 13 Posted February 24, 2015 (edited) ok so im assuming TB samples the entire mapframe then when i export as an EMF? i tried using the EmfToPng on the 120 part files TB exported and it doesnt throw an error but it just doesnt output any png files edit: nevermind, the tutorial i was reading said to drag all the EMF files at once, i tried doing it one at a time and that did work for me Edited February 24, 2015 by wantafanta Share this post Link to post Share on other sites