> Have you looked at Leveller? - http://www.daylongraphics.com/

I downloaded the demo and played with it for a bit, and honestly 
couldn't figure too much out!  :)  The cost was an issue for me, so I 
didn't look at it too seriously, but I'll look at it a bit further if 
you think it will work.  

> Have you tried dem2pov? 

I haven't--I'll look into it.  I used a DEM->TGA converter to begin 
with, but I do need to edit the files after they are converted from 
DEM--move features around, adjust them, add new features, etc.  So I 
need some way to edit them once they become 16bit files.  (editing them 
in 8 bit and then trying to convert them to 16bit after is what I was 
doing, but I've been running into the smoothness / stepping issue).  
Many of the DEM converters didn't look like an option for me, since I 
wouldn't have any way to manipulate the data afterwards.

I saw a couple more programs on the povray.org site, but many were dead 
links--earthscape, klevel, smooth, etc.  :(   If I can't find something 
that exists already, I might just write my own 8 to 16 bit converter 
with smoothing.  Or maybe set up a DOS box to run HLA.  

It sounds like the consensus so far is that I should attack this from 
the trying to get a smooth 16bit image angle and not use the heightfield 
smooth function.  None of my experiments to date have suceeded in 
getting the smooth function to work without the boxes effect in some 
degree.

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