Well, since you know the x and y coordinates, as well as the
z (though I'd refer to x and z coordinates and y being the height),
you could just genereate a mesh yourself.

One method would be to connect the different nodes with triangles,
which could be subdivided into smaller parts and are altered in height
to achieve the smooth rolling from peak to trough.

There are several ways you could go about this, especially since
you're asking about a method to interpolate different positions in
a 3D-Environment. Something like landscape reconstruction would
be needed here, which tries to derive the landscape from the different
known positions.

One idea might be to create a rectangular "cloth", which you will
attach to the different known nodes. This mesh could be altered
based on distance to the nodes. Its rather difficult though, you'd
have to always combine three nodes to triangles which cover the
entire section, to have interpolations without jagged jumps, and
you might still be able to see the triangles afterwards..

There are a lot of ways you could go, best would be to generate
the entire heightfield, export as image, and use POV's native height-
field, as Tom suggested.

--
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: Tim### [at] gmxde

> Hi,
>
> I'm new to POVRay and am struggling with something. Is there a way to
create
> rolling hills if you have specific X/Y coordinates where you want the tops
> of
> the hills and the lowest points of the troughs to be? I'd also like to
make
> them specific heights and want the surface to smoothly transition from
each
> peak to each trough and on to the next hill or trough. I've been looking
at
> Isosurface object, but I dont think that's what I'm after as it seems one
> needs to be able to generate the entire surface with a single formula.
>
> The number of coordinates per plane, their location and the height for the
> hill/trough at each location will vary and are from an external source. I
> plan to write a perl script that generates pov code to create the image
> which is then rendered periodically.
>
> Thanks for any help!
>
> Mark.
> mar### [at] hotmailcom
>
>
>

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