Generating terrain based off bathymetric data collected

Unity Engine
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1

Hello there,

I am currently trying to make an app in unity for a college project.

My app is AR and requires me to render real world bathymetric data off of the entire coast of ireland. However, the map size for this project is too late for a single mesh and im having issues exporting my heightbaps from informer.ie to unity.

Im wondering If there are any tools or resources/tutorials which can help me in this project. I feel I have scoured the entire internet at this point but any help/simular project will be very much appreciated.

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2

do you need to display whole area at the same time? (or can you display smaller areas?)
does it work if you generate multiple meshes instead of single mesh? (is there error if you use single mesh?)

otherwise probably need to reduce quality…
(if cannot display smaller area and then load new data on demand)

3

Hello there,

and thank you for the help. Yes, I want to render chunks/tiles for the user. Only problem is that my data size is too large for me to manually make tiles for every area on the map (as I have two months for the project).

The app requires data to load as a 3D mesh in real time for the user based on their location displaying the sea bed.

Appreciate any help!

Thanks again!

4

are there any online maps that have that tiled data already?

like,

maybe there are others too?

then it would be easier to load ready data from those…

5

Yes,

I have looked at these but they are all paid add ons. Looked at Mapbox, cesium etc.

I am planning on using this map which Is extremely detailed of irelands coast: Experience

havent tried googles api yet I guess but if I could get this data to load procedurally either using height maps or xyz coordinates that would be incredible

Thanks again for the help mgear!

6

if nothing else,
then you would have to download the full data from that site,
then split into tile format (and use as overlay for some map viewer… or custom map viewer)

for splitting,

(and there are others tile formats)

7

If you haven’t already, check out the heightmap support in Unity’s terrain tools. But I can’t help you much more since this isn’t really an AR specific issue.

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