Topographic Map

[SiliconPyro]

What would be the most efficient way to create a topographic display is KSP? The idea is that it would appear as a fixed camera looking directly downward. The important information is going to be presented on top of the topo lines, I just want them as a background, but I want them to be real.

For those who don't know, this is a topographic map:

It occurred to me that I could generate a plane for each elevation increment, then LineRender wherever those planes intersect the terrain collider. Now just to figure out how to do that!

Edited February 6, 2014 by norcalairman

[Runescope]

Well, I used to use a mapping plugin to output the elevation data to a CSV file and then input it into Surfer 10 to make different types of maps, topographic being one of them. I haven't done that in a while though as the mapping plugin hasn't been updated to work with .23 as far as I know.

[SiliconPyro]

I think I found a solution using a custom shader, but it might look wrong on flatter surfaces. I'm going to do some experimentation and see what looks good.

[Greys]

the terrain is defined as pairs of rather large triangles which together form 'perfect squares' in a 2D sense with the vertexes raised or lowered to create the variance; the best way in my eyes would be the planar section method but instead of making a line render of the collision pattern, simply determine where triangular edges intersect the plane and draw lines between them, rather than sampling along the mesh more frequently than may be necessary. The hard part will likely be assembling the lines in the correct order. From there you would only need to determine the highest and lowest vertexes in the region you care about and distribute however many planes you want between them; if done correctly it should be a rather cheap check to run but the entire map may be expensive to compile.

[cyberKerb]

This would be cool. I'd be able to 3d print sections of the terrain after scaling it a bit.

[lincourtl]

It'd be awesome if you could integrate this with damny's ScanSat.

[SasquatchM]

way back in the days of ISA I used a program called Quick grid to get results like these:

[cyberKerb]

You could try using progressing with the various libraries mentioned here.

http://www.onformative.com/lab/creating-contour-maps/

[SiliconPyro]

How would I go about generating a greyscale heightmap, or is that data available through the API already?

[Daemoria]

You can either use the heightmap from the planetary shader, or use a z-depth pass to get the information in realtime. Zdepth would only work if the camera was perfectly perpendicular to the ground tho. I would recommend looking at the SCANSAT plugin to see how he does it.