Yadgar wrote:
> There are some 
> people on the PoV scene who already digged quite into Earth 
> visualization, such as Christoph Hormann... but I remember him being not 
> very willing to share his experience :-((

What?

I don't remember ever having turned down someone asking questions 
related to terrain rendering.  On the contrary there is quite some 
information available on my website even without asking.  What i won't 
do even if i am asked is doing others homework.

Your posting here does not only describe something extremely ambitious, 
it also quite strongly indicates you did not truely realize how 
ambitious if meant seriously.  This is emphasized by the lot of 
inaccuracies that jump into the eye when reading the text like:

- confusing of 'resolution' with 'accuracy'.
- the SRTM did not produce any optical data so there is no necessity for 
color processing, the link you posted is to an image generated from 
landsat imagery.

Those things might not seem important to you but when planning a project 
like this i think it would first of all be important to have an idea 
about the basic facts like what data sources actually exist.

You should realize though that detailed large scale earth surface 
rendering (meaning high resolution data with less than 100m grid spacing 
over larger areas) is one of the toughest tasks concerning data 
handling.  Working with ascii data file formats and mesh files will not 
lead you anywhere.  For a render like on

http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3Ccllr5b%24v86%241%40chho.imagico.de%3E/

to be suited for high resolution printing (the one that is posted there 
was not yet sufficient in this respect) you have to process several GB 
of (binary) data for example.  (the bicubic interpolation patch 
mentioned in this posting is meanwhile available in MegaPOV BTW)

This is not meant to discourage anyone to do earth renders - on the 
contrary i have seen very nice examples of small scale renders like for 
example

http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/<421a4678%40news.povray.org>/

and it would be great to see more of such. People working on such 
concrete earth rendering project can be sure to get suggestions and tips 
from me if i have them.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ (Last updated 24 Jul. 2005)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

Post a reply to this message