Philmont in 3D

[selden]

I've completed a preliminary version of a 3D model of Philmont for use with Celestia.



Please visit the Web page
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... d.html#2.0
to see what's available.

I would *greatly* appreciate any feedback.

[ElChristou]

Selden, I don't have time to test all this right now, soon I will try to have a look; can you resume quickly the purpose of this addon please? (sorry, I just fly over your page, there is lot of info but don't have time to read it all )

[Jeam Tag]

Please visit the Web page
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... d.html#2.0
to see what's available.

Selden, your update for 'tot-panorama-v3.zip' isn't clickable. The Philmont-topos seem ok, I'll have a look on them tomorrow. Jeam

[selden]

ElChristou,

This is a 3D model of Philmont Scout Ranch and some of the surrounding area.

Philmont is a mountainous High Adventure Base run by the Boy Scouts of America. More than 20,000 people visit it each year for 10 days of exploration, hiking and fun.

See http://www.scouting.org/philmont/

JeamTag,

Sorry, I must have made a typo when I uploaded it. It's fixed now. Please try again. If you're using Firefox, you may need to refresh the error message page.

[ElChristou]

...Philmont is a mountainous High Adventure Base run by the Boy Scouts of America. More than 20,000 people visit it each year for 10 days of exploration, hiking and fun...

But why this addon? you are part of the organization of this camp?

[selden]

A friend going to Philmont one summer asked me if there was anything online about it, so I put together a short list of Web pages for him. Since then, that list has grown somewhat.

I finally decided to combine my interests in Celestia and Philmont in a single project.

[Jeam Tag]

JeamTag,
Sorry, I must have made a typo when I uploaded it. It's fixed now. Please try again.

Works fine now, thanks Selden. About Philmont, I tried a quick test on my poor machine, and have some strange things: locations seems under the map when I zoom in, and I see ugly black globes for them... (like the sign of an unreadable model, I guess)
How could they appear?Jeam

[selden]

Labels under the models is a bug in Celestia. It does not draw the labels at the correct altitude if you are "too close". They should be visible if you start from the Cel://url in the HTML file and magnify your view.

In fact, a Mesh for a camp model was not included, but the black objects you see are not drawn on my system, so I forgot about it.

Obviously I need to add a model to the zip file.

For now, you can put this model definition in the models folder as invisible.cmod

Code: Select all

#celmodel__ascii
# invisible plane

material
texture0 "invisible.*"
diffuse 1 1 1 opacity 0.5 end_material
mesh
vertexdesc position f3 normal f3 texcoord0 f2 end_vertexdesc

vertices 4
0 0 0  0 1 0    0.999 0.001
0 0 1  0 1 0    0.001 0.001
1 0 1  0 1 0    0.001 0.999
1 0 0  0 1 0    0.999 0.999

trilist 0 6
0 1 2 2 3 0
end_mesh


I'll try to provide something better in a while. A translucent cube might be appropriate, perhaps.

[Jeam Tag]

Labels under the models is a bug in Celestia. It does not draw the labels at the correct altitude if you are "too close". They should be visible if you start from the Cel://url in the HTML file and magnify your view.

You're right Selden, it depends of the POV: with the Cel://url sometimes the locations are visible, sometimes they are not.
And about the mesh places, now they are flying transluscent boards, on my install Jeam

[selden]

I've updated the 3D Philmont Addon to include a cube for the camps and a few other fixes.

You don't have to download the whole thing if you've already downloaded v1.0. Just download the patch zip and restore it to the same directory. Let it overwrite files as necessary.

http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... -patch.zip (17KB)

See http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... readme.txt
for a description of the changes.

[Jeam Tag]

I've updated the 3D Philmont Addon to include a cube for the camps and a few other fixes.

Well, Selden, I don't know if I not prefer the first fix with boards, finally: Here is what I have now on my poor machine: (same point of view as previous)
(and we can see cubes AND some boards!).
I must write 'philmont-positions-km.sscNO' if I want to see largely the panorama site because of the 2 cubes, witch are providing some parasites when you move around to explore the image (not only staying and looking at the point of view you provided with the cel:///url ). Sorry, Jeam
I know this isn't an easy addon, with the differents maps, sites etc...
BTW, about the topo maps, they are mayby some more liable ones on the World Wind USGS data? Just an idea...

[selden]

Jeam,

I agree it isn't the best

Unfortunately, the bugs in how Celestia places Location lables, which can be turned off and on, forces the use of SSC objects, which are harder to hide when you don't want to see them. The visible cube could be made a small part of a larger invisible model, though. I'll try to do that. They need to be selectable objects, since their InfoURLs are an important part of the Addon.

I'm not sure what you mean by maps that are "liable". The ones I used were created by the USGS. They're Transverse Mercator projections designed to be used on flat paper, so they aren't perfectly rectangular. The models are perfectly rectangular, though, which is part of the problem. The correct conversion from Transverse Mercator into spherical surfaces would have taken much more time and efrort than I was willing to spend. Maybe for v2 or v3.

[Jeam Tag]

Unfortunately, the bugs in how Celestia places Location lables, which can be turned off and on, forces the use of SSC objects, which are harder to hide when you don't want to see them. The visible cube could be made a small part of a larger invisible model, though. I'll try to do that. They need to be selectable objects, since their InfoURLs are an important part of the Addon.

Yes, i saw that. There are the two problems: a discret mesh to point the site, and a better altitude location...

I'm not sure what you mean by maps that are "liable"

Sorry for my poor English! I wanted to speak about the interstices between the tiles: If I Remember Correctly, in WorldWind (not installed on my computer for the moment) there were USGS data converted to be drawn even on the relief exaggerations, 'Sans solution de continuit?©' (I don't know what the English words are: that means that the map appears only one, even if it's made up of several pieces.).
I thought that these data could help to bind more properly the various more precise tiles you used. Jeam

[selden]

Jeam,

I suspect the WorldWind authors spent a lot of time determining how to properly work with non-rectangular maps. That must be a standard GIS problem. (GIS = Geographical Information System) Unfortunately, I'm not willing to spend time on that right now. There are bugs in 3DEM (the conversion tool I'm using) that prevent getting an exact match at the edges, and its author said it'll be a while before he can fix them.

However, I think I've managed to do something reasonable about the display of camp models. I've changed the camp model to be a single point, disabled the Locations file, and written some scripts to turn markers and labels on and off.

See http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... html#patch

[Jeam Tag]

However, I think I've managed to do something reasonable about the display of camp models. I've changed the camp model to be a single point, disabled the Locations file, and written some scripts to turn markers and labels on and off.

I agree, your work is already very good at this stage, Selden! I supposed the main goal was to site the scout camps, not to draw an invasion by amazing cubes from outer space! (1)Thanks for your efforts, this is a very interesting use of Celestia, IMHO.Jeam
(1)Or the scout ranch isn't a new 51 area, is it?

Edit : your script solution is absolutely very useful, Selden. Nice work.

[selden]

I've created some more camp selection CEL scripts.

Scouts pick one of 35 different "Treks" to go on while at Philmont Ranch. So I've created 35 different scripts to highlight which dozen camps are visited in each Trek, out of the 100 or so camps on the Ranch. Some minor bugs have been fixed, too.

I suppose a menu-driven CELX script could be used to select the appropriate Trek, but that would have been more work, and enough people have reported being unable to run CELX scripts that I didn't think it'd be necessary.

http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... -patch.zip
(35 KB)
[edit]
Apologies to those who couldn't download the patch. I made a typo in the URL. It's fixed now.
[/edit]