Greetings!

I am a cartographer interested in generating 3D rendered terrains draped
with images of various sorts (maps, satellite imagery, aerial
photographs, etc).  Although there are big $$$ commercial packages out
there that claim to handle this, I'm not eager to spend the money to
find out just how well they really work.  

It seems that rendering using POV with height fields and image maps
should work well, but I have had no immediate success hacking at it.  In
particular, I am concerned about keeping everything in scale and
matching the image map with the terrain model.  POV3 documentation says
that the image map is "projected" onto the surface (as from a slide
projector).  If so, this does not do what I want.  My image maps have
geo-coordinates associated with each pixel.  I want each pixel to be
painted over the appropriate coordinates on the terrain.

I would also like to be able to drape vector line work over the terrain
maps.  Can this be done without resorting to rasterizing the line work
and treating as an image map?  

I suspect that these are not new questions (I've only been looking into
this for a week or so).

Anyway, thanks for the response!

Eric Ringler
Polaris Cartography

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Eric,

  The program to do this is "Terrain Forge." You can make a black and white
bitmap as input, and then apply your color image on top of the mesh it
creates. I prefer color mapping the mesh myself, but it should work very
well. I'm afraid he neglected to put a URL in his program, but a web search
should come up with it.
  Now, you could help me! Let me know if you have any DEM files of Europe.
No, I know what's on the web. I need everything from the Arctic Circle to
Southern Libya, and Western Ireland to forty miles east of Moscow. Money is
a problem, so if it's not free well, I'll have to hack it I guess. :)
-- 
Paul Hinds
gri### [at] swbellnet

Eric Ringler <eri### [at] yanceymainncus> wrote in article
<34B### [at] yanceymainncus>...
> Greetings!
> 
> I am a cartographer interested in generating 3D rendered terrains draped
> with images of various sorts (maps, satellite imagery, aerial
> photographs, etc).  Although there are big $$$ commercial packages out
> there that claim to handle this, I'm not eager to spend the money to
> find out just how well they really work.  
>

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