.xyz vs .tiff for heightmaps

[atlas_v 0]

Hey, so im curious about Arma 3's terrain building and wanted to know some differences between file formats. All of the tutorials i have read so far use the .xyz format for the height map, is this something set in stone or could i use a 16/32 bit black and white .tiff? I plan on experimenting with World Machine/Houdini for my height maps and I don't believe either can export .xyz formats.

 

Thanks

[RoF 240]

Most of the guides say to use .asc, what ones you looking at?

 

But you can use .tiff.

Load up Terrain Builder and do file > import > Terrains and you will be able to see the supported format

[mikero 79]

I am curious to know how on earth you equate HEIGHT measured in meters with an image file. Be it tiff, png, bmp, or spaghetti Icons with purple dots. What possible information could any tool (such as TB) glean from a 2 dimensional pixel image that could define, mountains, and valleys accurate to 10cm ?

 

If you really do want to know more, read up on what the internationally used formats of xyz and the mutually equivalent asc actually contain.

 

[Dedmen 2696]

57 minutes ago, mikero said:

What possible information could any tool (such as TB) glean from a 2 dimensional pixel image that could define, mountains, and valleys accurate to 10cm ?

Well..

5 hours ago, atlas_v said:

could i use a 16/32 bit black and white .tiff

I'd say 32bit per pixel is enough information for

58 minutes ago, mikero said:

that could define, mountains, and valleys accurate to 10cm

 

[HorribleGoat 1473]

I would like to know which tutorials tell to use .xyz, when .asc is the far better and bug free working one.
 

.xyz works, sure but it has had the occasional corruption happen to it.

Image files are ok if you for some reason really need to use them, but why would you want to when there are real heightmap data formats (.asc, .xyz) available? Program you use dont export them or you want to draw the map yourself? (check out L3DT if you have not already)

[bludski 4421]

Importing and generating terrain from TIF is fine. Exporting to TIF is going to be very lossy.

Resizing ASC is problematic. Say if you import asc that is lower resolution than your map frame, you will get weird geometry. Resizing from TIF is fine as it will interpolate.

 

 

Using TIF is perfectly good BEFORE you have had it inside TB. All my terrains have been TIF before I put the height into TB.

 

As per usual, HG speaks truth.

[atlas_v 0]

Thanks for the replies. I have done some displacement mapping on geometry at work and the only image format our pipeline uses is .tif's so that's why I was curious about these other formats. From what I understand TB is just displacing the polygons in the y axis, unless it's doing some other witchcraft I dont see. I will do more research into that .asc format. And the tutorials I was looking at was JAF's youtube ones which use the .xyz format.

 

@HorribleGoat yes I plan on creating the terrain by hand

[RoF 240]

4 hours ago, atlas_v said:

 was JAF's youtube ones which use the .xyz format.

 

 

Don't follow him! We help a couple of people a week on the discord, who have followed along to his crap. He has to be one of the worst things to happen to the terrain making scene for a long time.

Do yourself a favor and stop watching that rubbish now, an try and forget all the stuff he's said.

 

THE guide to follow is this https://pmc.editing.wiki/doku.php?id=arma3:terrain:ultimate-terrain-tutorial

It was made by snakeman, but has had import from the community. It will teach you the correct way

[atlas_v 0]

6 hours ago, RoF said:

 

Don't follow him! We help a couple of people a week on the discord, who have followed along to his crap. He has to be one of the worst things to happen to the terrain making scene for a long time.

Do yourself a favor and stop watching that rubbish now, an try and forget all the stuff he's said.

 

THE guide to follow is this https://pmc.editing.wiki/doku.php?id=arma3:terrain:ultimate-terrain-tutorial

It was made by snakeman, but has had import from the community. It will teach you the correct way

Huh, good to know then, i have that tutorial bookmarked and ive been reading it already. Thanks!

[HorribleGoat 1473]

I would strongly suggest using a terrain creation program where you can actually see the terrain while you make it. 

You can for example paint the basic shapes you want your terrain to be on any image editor and use that as a base to generate/refine it in L3DT  using the different processes it offers. Or Id bet any other terrain creation tool can import the image as a base of a project.

 

It might take some time to learn a new program but for completely fictional terrain it will be worth it to be able to see it as you work on it.

 

It could be possible to use an image as displacement map in a 3D modeling software but as 4k (4096x4096) resolution heightmap is the first properly worthy to use (my opinion) that would mean 16777216 verticles containing grid, which can be rather straining and slow to work with. 

[atlas_v 0]

Absolutely, when I said by hand I meant using a software that can do it like World Machine instead of using a existing satellite heightmap. The hard part is finding a terrain that I want to make. 

[.kju 3244]

some WW2 one? 

[Uro 220]

On 9/21/2018 at 6:26 PM, atlas_v said:

Thanks for the replies. I have done some displacement mapping on geometry at work and the only image format our pipeline uses is .tif's so that's why I was curious about these other formats. From what I understand TB is just displacing the polygons in the y axis, unless it's doing some other witchcraft I dont see. I will do more research into that .asc format. And the tutorials I was looking at was JAF's youtube ones which use the .xyz format.

 

@HorribleGoat yes I plan on creating the terrain by hand

 

TB uses GDAL libraries to translate the input data into whatever magical internal format TB uses - as it should when working with GIS compliant input datasets.

Looking more into modules like gdal_translate and other modules will give you a more technical explanation of just exactly what the GDAL libraries are doing with your input data under the hood, which may be beneficial if you are familiar with Houdini and its code-based workflows.

 

The long and short of xyz vs. asc is that xyz contains a lot of geographic data that is not used by TB(redundant data), but TB still has to read and process that data through the GDAL libraries when importing data, so it will take a long time to process the data and cherry-pick what is and is not required.

ASC is an ascii based heightmap containing positional grid data on vertice points with a small header which contains the origin co-ordinates (X/Y) for the data contained within the file and thus is much(loads) faster in being processed by TB and the GDAL libraries compared to XYZ.