Hello everyone,

Yesterday I got the idea that making a POV scene with real-world scenery would
be a great thing for me to try for my next project.  I found out about these
so-called DEM files, which apparently hold the real scenery I`m looking for.
Now I found a program called 3DEM which would apparently allow me to at least
view these DEM files and convert them to terragen files.  Seeing that I knew I
could at worst case scenario convert these terragen files to a POV-Ray tga
files with world machine.  I have gotten this to work, but the problem is the
heightmap is very downgraded in resolution due to the fact that I don`t have a
licence for terragen or world machine.  Not being satisfied with this I
searched the internet for DEM to POV converters and found 3:

1-dem2pov (http://www.travelnotes.de/rays/grandcan/index.htm)
2-asc2tga (http://www.odi.ch/prog/povtools.php)
3-DEM2POV2 (http://www.terrainmap.com/rm3.html)

I can`t get any of them to work.  I`m using USGS ASCII DEM files for both
dem2pov and DEM2POV2 and an ASCII terrain matrix built by 3DEM for asc2tga (I
found that 3DEM doesn`t output the correct format for the heights (it uses
floats instead of unsigned integers and it doesn`t write the correct header for
the file either, based on the specification that came with asc2tga).

So does anyone know how I might convert a DEM file to POV tga with or without
3DEM?  And which format of DEM I`d need.

By the way, I went to http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm to
get a few DEM files of the Grand Canyon in GeoTiff format.  The reason I choose
GeoTiff was the fact that it is openable in 3DEM and the file format stores the
image map of the terrain not just the height values.

Thank you in advance for all the help.

Bridgeofstraws

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