Height for heightfield maps

[gliderace]

Hello!

I am creating a new custom map and textures for the Luxembourg-German border and Siegfried Line.

Right now, I am simply working in the "Clear_Spring_wet_map" directory. Here is my process [please steer me in the right direction if I am off!]:

1) I copied the "maintex.tga" and renamed it as "maintex_bak.tga" to be used as a backup base file.

2) I am placing ground textures on my "maintex.tga" file

3) I am defining the height in "NearHF.raw" by shades of gray (black=lowest, white=highest)

___

The problem I am having is the lack of a reference for the heightfield colors to actual meter values. In other words, 1,1,1 is the absolute lowest you can go (black) and 255,255,255 is the highest (white). Does anyone know the corresponding shade/meter values?

I have found through the wonderful support site that 32,32,32 is roughly where the water level (sea level?) is located.

Therefore, would something like 40,40,40 be around 20m above sea (water) level ... ? Ideas?

Also, I have read that 1px = 1m... That is for both "maintex" and "NearHF," right?

Many thanks!

[Knokke]

One suggestion:

Try using SRTM3 data available freely from the internet to make your height map: it will save you a lot of time, and will give you a realistic representation of your terrain, as real world data will be used.

There is one drawback though: you'll have to find a freeware utility that can import SRTM data and convert the data back to a RAW grayscale format.

SRTM3 files freely available on the internet have a 90m resolution, and each set of data covers an area many times bigger than the 4x4 km area in TOW. The difficulty is to find the correct portion of your terrain in such a big area as the one covered by the SRTM (several hundred kilometers). One way to do this easily is to use Google Earth to retrieve the exact lat/long coordinates of the area you want to model (by way of the markers in google earth), and use theses coordinates to find the small area you need in the big grayscale RAW picture extracted from the SRTM file.

There are peoples in this forum who know better than me how to retrieve height data for ToW from SRTM (or an other format, maybe), so they might have an easier solution than mine to get the data to an usable format.