12 miles Lidar scan of Monument Valley

[fixeighted]

Coincidentally I just got a job in that calls for a fly out to space, from a canyon based scenario.
I have tried and failed to get those same maps...only partial ones seem to be available
after many attempts, so I've ended up with not enough which is very annoying.
It's possible that I'm missing some step in the process but it appears simple, so not sure what's going on tbh.
In which case would it be possible for you to upload them somewhere please, or possibly you have the download links?, as it looks like the ideal coverage to be able to
switch to a zoom hack to end up at planet earth.
I'm using GAEA for this at the moment to try to recreate something similar, though I'm new to it so not sure whether it's possible to output such a large joined up area.

I'll understand if it's problematic for any reason, so don't feel obliged

[damaggio]

That is always a complicated thing to pull it off, first thing is find an area that has good Lidar coverage,(Monument Valley is missing a large area) not the entire US is done with Lidar yet, then from the same area you can find a larger terrain coverage from the SRTM 1 arc or 30 sec arc and then an even larger terrain map made from scratch in Gaea. Transitioning from close up to very wide is the hardest part, first hiding the seems and texture resolution for each terrain patch, aside from that some cleaver placed clouds and the natural motion blur might help disguising some mismatches. For extreme close up out of the canyon I would go with megascans rock formations or buy any available ones well made online, there are many on Turbosquid.
I've never done one quite like this so definitely a learning curve will be necessary here( this is also very time consuming for a single artist as you might now already)...a shot I did a while ago of Millennium Falcon and a large terrain escape in World Machine here. https://vimeo.com/222100867?embedded...owner=43539931
Good luck

[fixeighted]

Yeah I already have a scene which will work using Megascans...looks great for little effort, so it's just a matter of transitioning from that to a larger landscape.
I have canyon made up in GAEA and so I guess now I'm planning to incorporate the megascans stuff
into the GAEA scene, with possibly a secondary GAEA terrain to blend to/from, then work that into a satellite map of Utah.
They'll not have a movie budget so it's likely they will have to be satisfied with the best I can do with commonly available data and some tricks.

In theory it'll work but we shall see...I'm only a day into trying to sort it all out but so far it's all looking very achievable

[fixeighted]

So I got the Lidar data into both Gaea and Max, using the same basic maps as you have used.
I also discovered I don't need to mess with exposure for them to work, which wasn't giving the correct result for me.
Not sure how you managed the result without the banding I got.
Gaea can clamp them and max just need disp set to landscape and a very small value.
Do you think it's the same as you achieved in terms of detail?

My next small hurdle is getting maps to work. I'd appreciate any quickstart advice you can offer.
I know you mentioned extracting masks from Gaea/W Machine but I'm not entirly sure which I need to achieve a somewhat similar look to what you have managed.
I assume it's the slope/soil etc but are you using just those as mask for completely new shaders...Megascans or whatever....or are you using the satmaps?
I have experimented with them but the output is as the Gaea preview, showing horrible stretching on the verticals, which I think is a common issue.

The problem I can see with masks is that by using landscape displacement I can only have 1 uvw channel....can't see a way around that...

The attached one is experimenting with decals, which could come in handy if I can't figure it out

[damaggio]

Oh Wow! it's cool to see someone else tackling the same file.
Its hard to say if it is pulling out the same details but it looks like it is, and it should with Max and Vray.I found that it was easier to do 2D displacement and not use edge length in Normal displacement, it didn't affect rendering time and just gave me
all detail contained in the map.( but that is for a still image not animation)
I did get a similar gash seen in your image at the left bottom and that was because when I aligned in Photoshop the 4 maps , one quadrant was misaligned a pixel or too.Is that what you referring as banding?

Concerning the map extractions from Gaea, the masks, maybe you don't need as many as I did but the essential ones, lets start bottom to upper layers, maybe start with the dry river wash if that is going to be important, then a mask for the desert floor,then a mask for 45 degree of the slope sediments, next mask is the 90 degree cliff walls and one more for the top of the mesas.
Doing a texture map in Gaea , even exporting at 16K won't be enough to be close to the surface that's why tiling of the soil for each shader is crucial.
Also remember that you need a Vray triplanar node to project the cliff texture and a Normal map into the displaced 90 degree cliffs because the Lidar cannot detect details from 90 degree terrain so those features are lost, just becomes some straight vertical lines.
About the Uvs, I also only used one UV for the close terrain and the larger mesh had also only one UV, ...Udims would take too much time to texture and set it plus all additional masks...yeah don't go there.
I did not have the chance to play with the new Decal feature yet.
Hope that helps a bit more, I could provide you some of my maps but they might not line up with your set up. The tillable textures I could put on dropbox I think.

I did a flying animation low thru the landscape and sent it to Vray Cloud service but I rushed my camera animation and I wasn't happy at the end and moved on to other projects.

[fixeighted]

It's a fun though a tough project to take on.
For one person, as you said, it's a lot of areas to cover and for some of it, like this part, I have to learn all the necessary software and processes first.
Luckily it's all going extremely well, after a few initial worries.
As for the location, it's just so wonderfully coincidental that the storyboard I got needed
a canyon environment. There's not really anything like Monument Valley and so that and the fact the Lidar was available meant there was only ever one option

The detail part isn't a massive deal to be honest. The file I used is just that area and is a manageable 1gb, so I'll leave the rest of the area to some
extracted and stitched tiles from satellites.pro, as that resolution is fantastic. The zoom will be quick enough to hide any nasties.

Interesting that you spotted the texture break...I thought I had misaligned one. The banding I mentioned was due to my initial tests...trying to get the data processed I used exposure to
make the images viewable but couldn't get that to work properly.....at that point I was using 3d displacement on a dense plane. I tried a 16 bit version for whatever reason, which introduced horrible banding of course.
Then I thought to try 2d and used a tile of the raw unprocessed data just to see if it worked, and it did, perfectly!
So all I ultimately used exposure for was to make it visible whilst I stitched the parts together.

In the end, I have a zero segment plane with a 1gb raw height map using 2d displacement...the simplest of all options but it took 2 days to get there.
Plus it renders very quickly and doesn't slow down the viewport. I call that a win


Thanks for the info re. masks...I was thinking in the right direction at least, just got a little misdirected by the software texturing options.
I was looking at a video explaining splat maps, though I'm not sure if they'd be of any more use than simple masks and, yes, triplanars all the way!

Thanks for the offer of tileables but I should be ok with what I have or can make up, as they would in any case need to match the megascans
textures. Currently I'm hoping that some Forest scatters of rocks and little scrub items will also break it all up without killing my machine.
I was thinking it might actually be less hassle to make some new hero mesas in Gaea, to substitute for the Megascans, as of course the scans are open
at the back and only have a certain depth, which becomes very noticeable and awkward when seen from an aerial view.

I'll of course post results here when I have something that works as I need it to

[damaggio]

Yes, the exposure in photoshop is just to be able to see the map and then stitch them together, thankfully saving the preset for the first one you can match the others.


"In the end, I have a zero segment plane with a 1gb raw height map using 2d displacement...the simplest of all options but it took 2 days to get there."..... yes same here.

The splatmaps are more useful in a game engine but not in Vray.
For more mesas you can crop maybe 2 formations from the Lidar and blend them over each other in Gaea, rotate them also overlapping with some multiply option like photoshop , erode and generate a new little mesa as a mesh to place or duplicate in the scene.
Yes , post your results later and describe any cleaver tricks you came up with.

[fixeighted]

Aah ok, so I did the correct thing purely accidentally.
This is quite the learning curve

I just realised that of course the height map is huge, so I upped the disp resolution to 16k
for a clear increase in detail but seemingly zero impact on render time. Yay
I wonder why 16k is the limit...I know Gaea is planning to implement 32 bit output at some point
so maybe Vray's needs a boost

Great idea about merging bits, though I'm hoping to not need to get a full license just for this one job (can't output the good stuff without it)
Possibly the 1024 max output for the masks will be enough for my needs this time...should know in a few days, after trying to pull all the various other
bits together.

I only have 64gb ram at the moment, so all the tyflow stuff needs to fit in the scene also, without breaking anything.

[damaggio]

World Machine is also 16K, I'm glad to hear that Gaea now exports 16K because that was not the case a year ago or so.
The displacement I used was still the original 20K map, only the masks were 16 and sometimes smaller 8K

[fixeighted]

Ah yes that's what I meant...I used the Lidar in Max directly at 16k displacement.
Currently I can only export 1024 without a watermark from Gaea so I'm trying to
do as much as possible without resorting to a license, so basically making sure I can get out what I need first,
though I haven't really had time to get the masks out yet.

I've actually got a reasonable result from mashing together some very high res satellite maps as the attached...looks possibly serviceable
for the required shot I have to do, so basically as backround and aerial zoom.
It looks a bit dodgy at the moment but it shows the approach well enough for now.
You can see the scans very awkwardly placed to get a sense of scale and to work out a flat
enough area for the animation bits to happen.
I have all sorts of growing foliage to further add complexity and it all needs to happen in the one scene, at least that is the plan...nice and simple eh?!

The job is at quote stage (due in a few days) but unfortunately I can't quote on it without actually doing much of the work,
or at least get the processes figured out and an initial shots preview, as it's not something I can reliably guess at...def do not want to lose money on it.
If they go for my costs then I can factor in a license and further tart it up where necessary

[damaggio]

Yeah it's coming along very well.
As for the Gaea license if you can include into your quote that would be a great additional software for you to have and is a lot of fun do dig into its features on your spare time.
I wonder if 1024 mask will be too low res but it all depends on what's visible within the shot.

[fixeighted]

Yes, including it in the quote was my initial thinking, and for exactly the reason you suggest

I think I'll manage to get all the various basic elements in place at some point today, so I'll then dive back into Gaea and
see what masks I can output at 1k and assess their usefulness...it may be enough for the quote to succeed.

The shot will be framed close in to the Megascans elements and the hero object, so mostly the mesas will be a backdrop, only
really viewed in total as the camera zooms out to space. That move will be pretty quick and blurred, so actually as long as whatever texturing I do stands up
in the closer frames then it should be all good.

[fixeighted]

Bizarrely I have run into issues with the landscape that I cannot figure out.

What I have is 20m object set in this landscape, so want the scale to be correct.
However the only way the displacement works is with a plane that is relatively tiny in comparison.
If I make the plane the correct size then even the max limit of the displacement (1000000cm in this case) does nothing at all.
It's the same regardless of the units setup.


What is bizarre is that I was rendering this just fine a few days ago and have test images to confirm that, so what could possibly be the cause?

[damaggio]

Bizarre indeed, those previous tests were in a different scale? Are the transforms of the plane zeroed out?
the renders I did were in real world scale centimeters . Are you sure the big displacement map is loading up or that is enabled.

[fixeighted]

Yeah it's weird. I'm pretty sure the previous were all proper scale but I was rushing so may just have had a smaller version for some reason.
The only way I have got it to work today is by changing the exposure in PS, thus losing some detail, but at least it's the right scale.
Using the original it does displace but only by a tiny amount (with the max limit of 1mil cms) and it pushes the mesh way away from z 0
Here's a link to the height map https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t2eqldxco...32BIT.tif?dl=0 if you can work out
what's going on.
The attached show the difference and it's confusing. It should be that regardless of the size of the base plane, the height should be
as chosen, no?