High!

Since my childhood days in the 1970s I'm fascinated with maps, 
especially physical and topographic maps, and I early started designing 
fictitious continents and whole planets by drawing such maps. So when it 
comes to creating terrain with PoV-Ray, I also favor such a 
"cartographic" approach using contour line maps to be converted to 
heightfields rather than intuitive mesh modeling or fully procedural 
isosurfaces (which give only little control over topography).

Interpolating missing height levels manually from scanned contour lines 
is cumbersome, but nowadays there is at least one program to do this 
work - BlackArt (http://www.terrainmap.com/downloads/blackart.zip).
What bothers me more is that when viewed at close range, all 
heightfields inevitably look "blocky", so I ask myself whether it is 
possible to convert the height value matrix of a heightfield by 
"cross-approximating" each row and column into a discrete 3D function 
like it is used with isosurfaces...

Does anyone here know about such POV macros/external programs to do this 
job?

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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