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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