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Heightmap in Unity with real terrain data cookbook

Above is the Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) Model in a unity terrian, see https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/feature/nasa-tests-new-alloy-to-fold-wings-in-flight.html for more info on the SAW Project.

I was able to successfully add terrain data to my unity project, I wanted to take some notes down on the research.

1. I first pulled the hgt files from NASA, which is Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data, but I found that there wasn’t a way to convert them easily using GIMP. I did find a program called terrain convert that would do the work, but it just had a win32 binary and I didn’t want to spend time looking at the license.

After further research, I found terrain.party website. It pulls ASTER and SRTM 30meter data and you can download it as a PNG file.

2. In GIMP, the plan was to switch it to raw format, but I found I could easily import the png as an asset. One of the lessons learned was that you have to set your terrian object to the size of your height data. in this case I used the following settings in unity: Terrain Width: 1024 Terrain Length: 1024 Terrain Height: 100 (Best setting to make the environment look reasonable) Heightmap Resolution: 1025 (need to add one to the pixel size chosen Detail Resolution: 1024 For the heightmap png file I also resized it to 1024

3. Then I used a C# script that was found here: https://answers.unity.com/questions/1349349/heightmap-from-texture-script-converter.html

this seems like a reasonable way to make realistic environments, next I need to work on getting the model to fly in the environment.

#unity3d #heightmap #nasasaw