High!

Apache schrieb:

> I managed to find an old 3.5" diskette with some pictures I did in POV-Ray
> back in the year 2000.
>

And I, though having lost my early PoV exercises in countless system crashes
long ago, still found a printing of my first
attempt to render an Afghan landscape from a topographic map in 1996, and just
scanned it... by the way, it shows the
Spinghar mountains around bin Laden's Tora Bora fortress - purely coincident,
of course indicating no sympathy for OBL
(who, I'd guess, would condemn all raytracing as un-Islamic, for "mocking
God's creation" or so...).

Back then, I knew nothing about 16 bit heightfields, so it's only 8 bit... and
I obviously had no idea about smoothing the sharp
100 metre-intervals of the contour lines, so it all looks like rice terraces
on the Philippines or so!

Currently, I'm re-working my 300 dpi 1:300,000 heightfield of a portion of
southern Kandahar province (so each pixel
equals 25.4 by 25.4 metres) at 16 bit vertical resolution (which at my chosen
range, covering all altitudes of Afghanistan and
still keeping an easy-to-handle division, such as 50 metres per 256 values,
means 19.6 cm contour intervals!), much larger
than the small section posted here in last autumn - I'm going for 1250 by 1000
pixels!

Then, I'd also like to include some vegetation - does anyone around know of
halfway credible PoV models of Central Asian
semi-desert/steppe grasses and shrubs?

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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