A small question... How (look at attached image)are the colours in the Altitudes mapped to the terrain. I wish to map them to a terrain in the world view. I have found the colour maps, but cannot seem to get the mapping mode right.
Any help would be great... Thanks...
Gareth:)

2nd time lucky...lol

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12368&Form.ShowMessage=2201199#15

I got close to what you want when I was playing with contour lines on a terrain. Check out the link. You will need to connect Altitude to a Color Map node with your gradient, using a Brightness/Contrast filter and then play with the values of the filter to stretch your color map between the lowest and highest altitudes on your terrain.

Thanks, agiel. I think your examples are close to why I asked this question in the first place. I want to drive my eco using the colour map. The colours seem to look and map so well in the editor that If I could get it working like that, I could start to work on a way to drive the Eco using them.

The other thing you could do is heavily mix the material and make those materials altitude dependent, I have a few materials that do this that are 10-18 pairings deep that I've had great fun with doing ecosystems with, see the example I attached for the base materials, I'll attach the ecosystem render shortly. Basically I have a dark green material applied to the lowest elevations, fading up to a lighter green material and rising up to sand/dirt and ending in a snow/rock combo.

Here's the ecosystem render, I've got regular green maples mapped to the dark areas and added red and yellow maples for the light green areas, just be warned, I got a "limiting performance" message when I added all those trees to the ecosystem, but it was definately worth it. Ecoystems are insanely cool!

Hi Nanotyrannus, That's a great terrain! I'd like to make something similar. Is that something I could do in Vue 4, mixing terrains for different elevations, and might you have a sample I could learn from? I'm still new to alot of that type of stuff. Thanks, Carl

That is a beautiful example. I wish I could do something like that. Are/would you be willing to make the mat available for download.

Carl - The terrain itself is actually a 3 meter resolution dem file downloaded and compiled from the USGS and imported into Vue 4 Pro / 5 Infinate (importing into Vue 4/5 Esprit the terrain has to be chunked down because of some sort of terrain import limitation that e-on neglected to mention as being part of the esprit lineup. Because it can only be imported wholly in Vue 4 Pro I have exported it to a bmp format that you should be able to import into Vue 4 Esprit (you may have to do some resizing as the terrain is not perfectly square) and it probably isn't going to be the same resolution as what I was able to get in Vue 4 Pro (7082 x 4928) But it would be a start. The other side is I have no way to host these files in the public domain (the bmp terrain file is 34 mb and the texture file is 145 kb) I could email you the texture file as it is only procedural textures, but the bmp of the terrain file is definately too large for emailing.

<< I could email you the texture file >> Would you be prepared to put it up in the "Free Stuff" area? I for one would like to be able to study it to see how it works. Thanks, Bernie

In order to post stuff to the "free stuff" area you have to have it hosted on your own site, unfortunately I don't have that and don't have the time to look into it at the moment, about all I can do is email it at the moment, it's a wholly procedural material so it's small enough to easily be emailed. Let me know. Orion

This does indeed look very interesting, Nanotryanus! Welll beyond my scope of understanding at this point, but I would also like to get my hands on it...it would, I think go a long ways toward helping me and possibly others to get a better grasp on this "eco-control" issue? There is an option...yousendit.com...that would enable you to be able to send the entire package w/o having to get into hosting your own site. Just a thought...but will keep my eyes on this thread anyhoo'-)!

Great link spider will come in very handy. videodv.

I'll check more on it when I have time, thanks for the info, I'll write more here later. -Orion