Firmament Terrain Import and Manipulation, and Image Post-process filters for Terragen Firmament is Copyright ©2000 John McLusky. All Rights Reserved. For some reason, I thought "firmament" meant ground or terrain. It doesn't, though - it means Heavens. Although the name doesn't connect to the program, it still sounds pretty good. And Anthill doesn't mean anything either.

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Terrain Import Filters

Supported Formats:

• DEM/SDTS - This format covers the real-world data available from the USGS, which covers the entire United States. Unlike many other programs, Firmament does not need to convert the data to an intermediate format.
  Note that the USGS may have changed their data format since this release.

• 3DEM's DAT Format - this binary format is compatible with 3DEM, which is a popular converter/viewer for many terrain formats. By using 3DEM to convert to this format, you can additionally use Nasa's Mars data files and GTOPO30 DEM files, which cover the entire world.

• 3DEM's BINN Format - Superceded the DAT format in 3DEM 8.

• BMP - all types of Windows Bitmap are supported. Please note that loaded images are converted to shades of grey with white representing high terrain and black representing low terrain.

• STM - Simple Terrain Map. Used by few programs, but notably the vdem2stm program, allowing you to use VistaPro DEM format files indirectly.

• POV-Ray Heightfield - The special .TGA files used to describe terrains in POV-Ray.

• 16-Bit RAW - I don't know about any programs that use this, but I'm sure some exist. Allows higher resolution height information than 8-bit RAW files, which are already supported in Terragen.

Terrain Manipulation Filters

• Normalize: Often, the data imported from DEM files is outside of useful ranges for Terragen. This Terrain Accessory allows you to reduce all altitude values so the lowest is at zero.

Image Filters

• Unsharpen: This Photo Effect plugin applies an Unsharp Mask to the final rendered image. This effectively sharpens the image only in high-contrast areas, bringing out fine details in a render. Do not alter the Power of this filter too much, however - the effect will be too pronounced.

Best of all, Firmament is a free download. To install, unzip the zipfile to your main Terragen directory or the "Plugins" subdirectory (e.g.. c:\Program Files\Terragen\Plugins\).

• Download firmament-tgp.zip (203k) Version 1.6

Sometimes, the height data can be out of "useful" ranges for Terragen - or the height data can start at a ridiculously high value. I have written a small program to "normalize" the height values to start at a lower altitude, or to reduce the range of the terrain. Think of it as a more user-friendly "Bound Vertical" function.

System requirement: Terragen 0.7.42 or higher. No additional DLLs or other support files are required.

Instructions

Terrain Import

From the Terrain Plugins menu, select the appropriate import plugin. You will be asked to choose a file. Select a file and choose OK. It may take a while to load some types of file (particularly DEM./SDTS, which are particularly complicated files), so be patient.

To better see what you are selecting, it might help to change the view ratio - this can be done from the View menu. The area which will be imported into Terragen is shown with a red dashed outline. You can move the outline by clicking or dragging on the map, or resize it by right-clicking inside the selection, or by using the Selection menu. When you are happy with the selection, click on the "fi" button or choose "Exit and use Selection" from the File menu. The selected area will be imported into Terragen.

The Normalize filter is also selected from the Terrain Accessories button.

Image Filters

To apply image filters (at the moment, only the Unsharp Mask is included), click the "Camera Settings" button in the Rendering Control. Then choose "Effects", and then the "+" button. You can choose the Unsharpen filter from the list. Although Terragen allows you to select a plugin more than once, it is not advised with the Unsharpen plugin.

Known issues

• If you choose "Cancel" while selecting a file, the main Firmament window will be shown anyway. You can close this window or select another file.

• The selection size must be an integer multiple of the terrain size.

• You can not use input data which is smaller than Terragen's terrain. If you need to use smaller sized data, try using a smaller terrain in Terragen. Likewise, if you want to import a large region into Terragen, you must set up Terragen to use a larger Terrain size by default.
  To change Terragen's terrain size, click on the button below the Terrain view on the Landscape dialog. Help can be found in the User Guide.

• Height data may not be scaled correctly.

• STM import may not work sometimes (if at all).