"albe99" <alb### [at] hotmailit> wrote:
> Hi to all..
> Sorry for my bad english, but I need a code-sample or a tutorial that
> describes how POV-Rays isosurface objects can be used to render a landscape
> from digital elevation maps (DEM)..
> can someone help me?..please?..
>
> thanks,
> Alberto


DEM data is better handled by POV's "height field" function, which creates a
mesh of triangles on the fly.

The trick is to convert the DEM data into a form which the height field
function can use.

This can be done by reading the DEM data and writing a Targa file in which
only the red and blue bytes contain the elevation data. There used to be
some POV utilities which could do this; for my own part, I use software
called MacDem, on a Mac, and this software is quite amazing, in that it
very quickly reads DEMs and renders a shaded-relief image of the terrain
(in a few seconds at most), but, perhaps more importantly, it can merge
multiple DEMs.

And then it will quickly export the (possibly merged) DEM data to a Targa
file of exactly the right sort, and to a POV scene file which contains the
exact scaling information required to render the terrain without
distortion.

I do not know if any such freeware or sharware is available for Windows or
Linux platforms; the combination of merging DEMs and writing, not only the
Targa file, but the POV scene file, is wonderful.

I have been using POV to render landscapes for ten years now. One can also
use a sun position algorithm to place a virtual sun in the sky, for any
minute of any day of any year.

I doubt this will help, but I hope it does.

--Russell Towle

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