0

We need to convert some specific stream 2D video to 3D video with some symbologies on it. To make an example: 

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-YKYjigYgok" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

edit: I added the video link here due to some errors in HTML insertion.

this is something similar to our project. As you can see, heights are indexed as colors, some shades, shadows are also are seen. the question is, can we convert those mountains and other shapes into 3D in a simple way? I ve seen many 2D-3D converters out in the market but they are undeterministic. We want to make our niche software for this and don't know where to start. We can utilize colors and shadows(for height and light direction) and also we have the altitude of the plane. Once we handle the mountains and other contents, putting 3D symbology is not an issue for us.

What I seek here is just some direction to get this done in a fastest way. Regards.

LuckyB
  • 31
  • 3

1 Answers1

0

I think what you're looking for is called heightmap. You start from a 2d matrix with the height values in every cell and generate a 3D terrain based on the matrix.

The naive way to do it is to assign a vertex to each point in the matrix and then link them together with simple triangles.

As you can imagine is your map is large this will mean a lot of triangles. There are techniques that try to compress flat spaces or things that are very far away so that you spend the triangles on areas where they add more details. See for example quad-trees. This is also why some renderings seem non-deterministic since the algorithm is going to change the geometry on far away things in a way that it becomes visible. This can be solved by tunning the algorithms and put a larger weight on how visible the change is. A cheap-ish way of doing it is to measure the volume difference between the different levels of details, but only works decently when you don't have sharp spikes or pits in you map.

I assume assigning colors to the heights is not a problem here.

Sorin
  • 11,863
  • 22
  • 26