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Fork of Rendszerguru/ARTE-QGIS-plugin by Icebird (MIT). Adds hydraulic erosion, per-feature road and river shaping, live previews, and a NoData fix - see What this fork adds. Everything below is upstream's and still applies; each new pass falls back to the original code if it fails.
ARTE is an advanced QGIS plugin designed for Arma Reforger terrain creators. It provides a streamlined workflow to extract high-resolution satellite imagery, process digital elevation models (DEM), apply OSM-based Terrain Engineering, and automatically generate Enfusion-ready import parameters.
- Interactive Map Selection: Visually draw, move, and resize your terrain boundaries directly on the QGIS map canvas with aspect-ratio locking.
- Flexible & Expandable Elevation Sources:
- Custom Source Manager (New ✨): Add, edit, and remove your own terrain data sources and custom download links directly through the plugin interface.
- AWS Terrarium: 30m global resolution database, no API key required.
- Mapbox Terrain-RGB: Ideal for high-fidelity global elevation data, requires Mapbox API key.
- OpenTopography Datasets: Gives access to premium LiDAR, COP30, AW3D30, and EU_DTM data, requires OpenTopography API key. OpenTopography COP30 is highly recommended as the most optimal option.
- Note: Both Mapbox and OpenTopography require a free API key to access their servers. You can easily generate your personal tokens by creating a free account on their official websites and pasting them directly into the plugin interface.
- OSM Terrain Engineering: Automatically flattens heightmaps under roads/railways and smooths riverbeds using real-time OpenStreetMap data.
- Enfusion-Ready Export: Automatically calculates the exact
Grid cell sizeandHeight scaleparameters required for the Arma Reforger Workbench. - Flexible Formats: Export heightmaps as 16-bit PNG, Esri ASCII Grid (.asc), or raw Float32 GeoTIFF.
When enabled, the plugin uses OpenStreetMap vector data to guide terrain modification of raw DEM data for Enfusion workflow preparation:
- Smart OSM Filtering: Fetches data from Overpass API (with fallback endpoints) and filters roads, rails, and water features, excluding bridges and tunnels.
- Dynamic Road & Lane Widths: Parses OSM tags (where available) such as width and lanes to estimate corridor widths for buffering and rasterization.
- Pixel-Aware Embankments: Uses buffer scaling and distance-based falloff that adapts to raster resolution (pixel size) to avoid overly sharp or blocky transitions.
- Dual-Mask Water Processing: Combines water line and polygon data into raster masks and applies smoothing and morphological cleanup to improve coastline continuity and reduce artifacts.
- Riverbed Shaping: Modifies terrain under water features using DEM-derived slope information combined with smoothing and distance falloff, applying a simplified depth offset for game-ready river profiles rather than true hydrological modeling.
- Built-in Flood Protection: Ensures roads and railways are not lowered below nearby water levels by applying elevation constraints during terrain modification.
- Visual Audit Logs: Outputs a real-time
engineer_debug_[timestamp].txtlog and aheightmap_diff_[timestamp].tiffile showing terrain modifications for debugging and QA.
- Download
ARTE-QGIS-plugin.zipfrom Releases. - Open QGIS and navigate to Plugins -> Manage and Install Plugins...
- Select the Install from ZIP tab, browse for the
.zipfile and click Install Plugin. - Note: ARTE automatically registers its own update repository for seamless future updates.
- Click the ARTE icon in the toolbar or find it under the
Arma Tools (ARTE)menu. - Click 1. Load Satellite Preview to center the map.
- Click 2. Select Extent on Map, drag the red bounding box, and press
ENTERorRight-Clickwhen finished. - (Optional) Use the Source Manager to set up custom terrain data providers.
- Set resolutions, select your Elevation Data Source, and click OK.
- Open
enfusion_import.txtand copy the calculated scale values directly into your Arma Reforger World Editor!
A 2 km export at 8192 px is 0.26 m/px, but AW3D30 is 30 m/px — about 119 of every 120 pixels are interpolation, so terrain arrives smooth and featureless. These additions put plausible detail back and fix defects in the existing shaping. All figures measured on a real 8192² export.
- Droplet simulation (numpy port of erodr, MIT) carving drainage channels and gullies the source DEM cannot resolve.
- Presets subtle / moderate / strong, scaled per megapixel so a preset means the same at any resolution.
- Parallel: tiled across CPU cores, 5.1x on 11 workers. A full 8192² pass is ~4 minutes.
- Protects roads and riverbeds already shaped by Terrain Engineering.
Upstream flattens roads with a 2-D gaussian over the raster, which does not know where the road goes and mixes in terrain from both sides. This fork shapes each feature along its own length — sample a profile down the polyline, smooth and grade-cap it, then write it back across the corridor.
| upstream | this fork | |
|---|---|---|
| Cant across carriageway | 2.345 m | 0.024 m |
| River steps running against flow | 422 | 112 |
Rivers get a monotonically descending bed, bounded so it cannot trench through high ground.
Two Preview / Tune dialogs show what a setting does before committing to a multi-minute run — one for erosion, one for shaping. The shaping preview plots a road cross-section and river long-profile, because a 7 m road is two pixels wide on a 2 km map and a canted carriageway or pooling riverbed is invisible from above.
Terrain Engineering went from 291 s to 64 s (rivers 108 s → 7 s, heavy roads 46 s → 6 s). Shaping also used to crash QGIS at full resolution — it compared every pixel in a road's bounding box against every point along it, a 209 GiB allocation for a road spanning the map. A distance transform does the same job in one bounded pass.
Where the DEM source does not quite cover the requested area, GDAL fills the shortfall with 0 and nothing records that those pixels were never real. A "sea" of 0 m terrain then sat against ground at ~2465 m, so the 16-bit heightmap had to span 2921 m instead of the real 478 m of relief — squeezing every actual feature into a sixth of the available precision, and writing a wrong height scale into the import file. Uncovered pixels are now marked and filled by continuing the nearest real terrain outward, before road and river shaping runs.
- Two buttons — Export (no erosion) and Export with erosion — so it is never ambiguous which you are getting. The erosion button stays disabled until a heightmap exists to erode.
- Long stages report progress and stay cancellable, instead of the window freezing for tens of seconds.
- Let one export finish before starting another — two erosion passes will fight over your CPU cores.
See CHANGELOG.md for what changed in each release.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - free to use, modify, and distribute.
Created by Icebird - Copyright (c) 2026. Fork additions by gruppe-adler.