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Point cloud - height map (.sc4m to .txt)

Started by kbieniu7, November 13, 2015, 06:03:08 AM

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kbieniu7

Hello!

Does anybody of you, smart guys, know if there is any way to get a point cloud with coordinates from a city tile?  :) I mean, to get a .txt file with x, y, z coordinates for each point of a tile, for exampe:

x         y               z
89,2   303,5           560,2
109,9   304,5           625,5
38,5   299,6           564,1
7,9   300,7           440,7
87,3   302,8         574,5
8,4   300,5      570,1
85,4   302,3           614,2
47,8   301,9           675,4
2,5   301,6           721,3
56,7   304,3           693,5
111,4   304,5           700,8

Seems like an engineer's geek. I play a bit with terraforming and railway designing now. I thought about exporting my in-game terrain into AutoCad and create a 3D surface of a part of a region. The points, that I pasted as an example, I've collected them with "terrainquery" in-game tool, but it's not possible to measure bigger area manually.

Thanks in advance for any ideas and advices ;)
Thank you for visiting Kolbrów, and for being for last ten years!

c.p.

With some extra software you can do it.  Here is one way.

You will need:
SC4Mapper by Wouanagain (on the LEX)
Quantum GIS software (it's a pretty big program, but it's free).  Available here:
http://www.qgis.org


First, load your region in SC4Mapper then export as a 16-bit Png.

Open Quantum GIS
Go to Raster->Conversion->Translate on the menu

At Input Layer , select the .png you saved in SC4Mapper
At Output Layer, select the ASCII Gridded XYZ format and enter a file name
Hit OK and wait for it to finish

Then, open the .xyz file in a text editor (such as notepad) and run a search and replace, to replace the funky special character that separates each point, with a carriage return, (to get it in the format you show above.)

The result will be all the points of the grid, but they will be at a very distorted scale.  Once you get the points into autocad, you will have to scale them 16x on the x and y axis and 0.1x or 0.2x (I forget which) on the z axis.

It may be possible to do the rescaling in Quantum GIS before you export, but I don't know enough about the program to do it myself.

Hope that helps :)

kbieniu7

Hey!
Thanks a lot for your advices  :) I never used Quantum GIS before, seems I will need to take a look at it. I opened my region in sc4terraformer. However, as I export it to the grayscale the terrain shape is barely visible. Is there a way to scale the grayscale?

Thank you for visiting Kolbrów, and for being for last ten years!

c.p.

You can use the "Compressor" in "Global Tools" in sc4terraformer to exaggerate the vertical relief before you export the 16-bit grayscale.  (Make sure to do this on a copy of the region you don't want to keep.)  This will distort the vertical relief of your points even more than what I mentioned above.  A 16-bit grayscale will be much, much darker than an 8-bit grayscale, but is much, much better quality.

kbieniu7

Ok, thanks! I'll take a look at it, if I have more time later. Thank you very much for the help!  :)
Thank you for visiting Kolbrów, and for being for last ten years!