Hi-

I’m a VFX Sup coming from a Non-gaming perspective and I’ve got to say there are a lot of really inspirational tools here.

One of these is MapBox.
I can see this helpful for roughly sketching shooting locations, etc.

I built a template based on MapBox and was curious if I could get some feedback on how to approach some things. I’m coming from a Flame background, so apologies if some of these questions are basic and mundane.

So I’ve created a heroFrame and promoted it so that you can enter latLong, zoom and tile offset in it and then inside the sop it’ll generate the rings around the Hero.

Questions:

1- Currently, I need to go in and download each texture map individually and manually. Is there a way for automating this?

2- Similarly, for exporting the FBX for each, is there a way to automate? Unlike loading the textures, I can select them all and hit render and then go away for awhile, but looking for an elegant solve so that avoids manually selecting. This one is less problematic than loading the textures.

3- Currently I am offsetting the tiles manually, tho they are linked thru the rings w expressions. Is there a known offset based on zoom? I’m guessing it’d change relative to it’s position on the globe, but would be mighty handy if someone had insight on how to calculate.

4- I’m looking for a way to auto-align the height of the tiles. I’m guessing that it’ll be a vex solution measuring the height of the points in the corners of the tiles? Any insight would be much appreciated.

5- Lastly, I’ve tried using the GameDev_gameRes sop to make lighter versions of FBX after the hiRes is generated. Although it creates the AO and normals fine, the baseColor always comes out black so I use the orig texture I downloaded from mapBox. Any idea what I’m missing?

Here’s a link to my WIP setups:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ourt5148xfug9j4/AAAc5J-kuMfVpatJxuaq4sEfa?dl=0 [www.dropbox.com]

I’ve created them so it’ll auto create directories for the geo and textures based on the name of the file, so choosing a new location would mean changing latLong, changing name of setup to match, and then downloading textures and generating the FBXs.

Any suggests on how to approach better would be much appreciated.
Thx for the time and the cool tools you guys are developing.

Cheers-
Andy D.
www.imag4media.com

A few pics to clarify what i'm sketching in the HIP files.

Update:

Noticed that downloading the textures and/or creating the fbx can sometimes hang up my creaky old mac trashcan. Since I’ve set it up to name procedurally, forcing the app to quit and restarting where it got hung up works fine. Still odd and worth pointing out.


Also, noticed that sometimes i’ll get black tiles from mapbox.
Put in LatLong for Mt. Sunday in NewZealand and hero is fine but the tiles northWest of the hero seem missing.

Thx for listening.
Andy D.

Hey Andy!

Thanks for the setup and comments.

I've updated the mapbox node to have an offset parameter. The idea here is that you'll have multiple mapbox nodes with the same value, but different offsets and you can merge them together.

It handles the matching of the tiles for you, so you don't need to worry about the offsets.

We'll look into a way of automating it in the future, but in the meantime that should help you get closer to what you need.

All of the automation currently would have to be done with a higher level python script that drives all of the nodes together.

Hope the update helps you!

Luiz

Hi Luiz-

Update is on new build/update of gameDev tools?
Very much appreciate you checking it out.

Andy D.

Yeah, it will be on tomorrow's build of the GameDev tools. New builds get built around 1am EST

Let me know if that helps you

Great.
Thx.

Hi.

Finally had a chance to try out updated mapbox.
Offset is very handy for placing the tiles in x and z.

Two questions:
-Is there a known offset for the latLong for the surrounding tiles?
-Is it possible to have offset in Y? Or do I need to do w vex?

I'm guessing the distance would involve some elegant math based on something like this:
https://www.thoughtco.com/degree-of-latitude-and-longitude-distance-4070616 [www.thoughtco.com]

I just want to do procedurally so no matter the latLong, the surrounding tiles will line up correctly.

Thx again for the fun tools.

A

imag4media
Hi.

Finally had a chance to try out updated mapbox.
Offset is very handy for placing the tiles in x and z.

Two questions:
-Is there a known offset for the latLong for the surrounding tiles?
-Is it possible to have offset in Y? Or do I need to do w vex?

I'm guessing the distance would involve some elegant math based on something like this:
https://www.thoughtco.com/degree-of-latitude-and-longitude-distance-4070616 [www.thoughtco.com]

I just want to do procedurally so no matter the latLong, the surrounding tiles will line up correctly.

Thx again for the fun tools.

A

I'm guessing you've realized this already but, the offset values are 1 offset = 1 tile at whatever zoom you've specified. So you don't have to calculate. An offset of 0,1 will give you the adjacent tile to the north.
The annoying bit is trying to automate because the initialization/downloading bit doesn't seem automatable at the moment.


If I were to automate the offsets in a grid I'd do something like this in a for loop:
Offset 0 Offset 1

Hi - does anyone know why Mapbox would throw up an error like this when asked to import? (I'm latest houdini plus updated plugins, scanning smallest area possible). Any wisdom welcome.


Error
Invalid source /obj/geo1/mapbox1/optional_blur/terrain_layer1/foreach_end2
Error: Failure to cook template geometry..

jamestmather
Hi - does anyone know why Mapbox would throw up an error like this when asked to import? (I'm latest houdini plus updated plugins, scanning smallest area possible). Any wisdom welcome.


Error
Invalid source /obj/geo1/mapbox1/optional_blur/terrain_layer1/foreach_end2
Error: Failure to cook template geometry..

Could you try updating Labs and make a new instance of the MapBox node. We just did a big update, which changes how it works under the hood (and adds a bunch of new cool stuff as seen here: Link [twitter.com]