=?ISO-8859-15?Q?J=F6rg_=27Yadgar=27_Bleimann?= <yaz### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> 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

Have you tried using the "smooth" statement in heightfields?

-Mike

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