Hello. I'm new to POV-ray and new to these groups. I'm trying to use POV to
create nice photo-real earth imagery (or exaggerated earth imagery, boosting up
the terrain).

To try and do this I've got satellite imagery, which I can drape over
height-field topography. This looks fine using some 8 bit topography entered as
height-field.

But when I try and bring in 16-bit imagery I can't seem to get it to work. It
clearly doesn't support 16-bit GeoTIFF, so I've tried converting from GeoTIFF
(and from raw) using Image-Magick to get one of the 16 bit formats supported by
POV. I've created 16 bit PGM, and 16 bit PNG (as well as all sorts of odd
formats with 16-bit red channel and nothing green or blue), but these don't
seem to create what I want.

It looks like they are overflowing at the value 256, and are not really 16 bit.
Or there's a little-endian/big-endian confusion, but switching between the two
doesn't help.

Is there something special in the 16 bit formats used by POV? Are they signed or
unsigned? And can anyone recommend a way of creating usable 16 height-fields
from raw or geotiff files [I'm exporting these from Global Mapper if anyone is
familiar]? What options would be sensible on an image magick command line to
create these?

For your information, I'm working under Windows XP, and at the moment don't have
any compilers for a recompilation as I'm scared of compiling anything under Win
because it's such a stupid system.

Thanks in advance if anyone can help me.

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