> Another question, going much further into possible methods of 3D terrain 
> modeling: as meshes (as well as heightfields) aren't really the golden 
> road to photorealistic terrains based on real elevation data, I thought 
> about computing an approximating function for each data column and row 
> respectively and then "cross-approximating" somehow these two arrays of 
> functions (in my case, each containing 1200 functions) in to one 
> incredible complex function describing the whole data matrix as an 
> isosurface.

Depending on your data, spline patches could be worth a try. Not
necessarily the ones provided by POV itself, but e.g. NURBS-patches. You
could then add different levels of noise afterwards to "unsmooth" the
whole thing and make it look like terrain again. Tor Olav Kristensen has
posted some animations and images containing NURBS, perhaps you could
start there...


HTH,
Florian
-- 
camera{look_at-y*10location<8,-3,-8>*10}#local a=0;#while(a<999)sphere{
#local _=.01*a-4.99;#local p=a*.01-5;#local c=.01*a-4.995;<sin(p*pi)*5p
*10pow(p,5)*.01>sin(c*c*c*.1)+1pigment{rgb 3}}#local a=a+1;#end
/******** http://www.torfbold.com ******** http://www.imp.org ********/

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