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High!
A few days ago, I asked for ready-made heightfields of Afghanistan...
(ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/GLOBE_DEM/pictures/AFGHANISTANbw.tif), about
five times I had to restart the download because of an unstable
connection, but finally, the whole map was on my harddisk.
I didn't imagine that it covered *such* a large area around Afghanistan
- from Georgia to the Gulf of Bengal, from Hadramaut in eastern Yemen
almost to the Altai mountains at the southern edge of Siberia! So the
scale - unfortunately - isn't 250 m/pixel as Juha assumed, rather 1
km/pixel... 250 m, that would indeed have been a sensation!
Nevertheless, it's still the largest greyscale heightfield of
Afghanistan I ever came across!
I cut out a portion of 1848 by 1496 pixels containing mainly Afghanistan
and its closest neighbourhood from about Mashhad/Iran to Kashmir... then
I started to implement the heightfield in a simple scene, firstly using
a dull "standard desert" texture.
A little later, I found a colorized version of the very same map in the
same FTP directory, so I could make use of it to have a more
differentiated texture (though that's far from what I'm going for). It
took me some scrupulous measuring to find again the upper right corner
pixel of the grayscale map on the colorized version, but after that it
was easy.
As the horizontal resolution is quite low compared to the vertical
resolution (33,3 metres), I had to exaggerate the relief's height by a
factor of 2 to work out the terrain features properly.
Attached here are a few renderings of the most famous (and partially
infamous) places in Afghanistan, made with this "physical map" texture,
the western oasis of Herat, Bamiyan Valley (don't try to spot the
buddhas ;-)... but I have access to printed "relief maps" of at least
one of the two statues, perhaps in the more distant future, I'll be able
to provide you with a reconstruction of their pre-2001 state!), a view
from Paghman range (west of Kabul) into upper Helmand valley, several
views of the Kabul basin, Tora Bora and Koh-e Noshaq (7485 m),
Afghanistan's highest mountain, here the only image where the camera
location is not on Afghan territory, but on Mt. Tirich Mir located in
northern Pakistan...
As I mentioned before, I'm not that contented with this texture... I
still aim at a naturalistic soil texture, derived from satellite images
and vegetation maps. And, of course, for my high-flying ambitions of
virtual Afghanistan (Khyberspace, PoVghanistan), this tiny little 8 bit
map is magnitudes of order too small-scaled, perhaps some of you
remember my postings of October 2002, when I showed scenes based on a
hand-edited 16 bit heightfield at 25.4 *metres*/pixel covering a few
square miles of southern Kandahar province... its vertical resolution is
just 19 *centimetres*! But, alas, even when working on it 8 hours a day,
7 days a week, it would take me not less than 95 years to complete
entire Afghanistan...
So let's together explore Khyberspace - soon also on my homepage!
http://home.arcor.de/yadgar/khyberspace/index-e.html
Afghanistan Chronicle: http://home.arcor.de/yadgar/index-e.htm
Yadgar
Now playing: Angkor Wat (Yes)
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Attachments:
Download 'kabul_nw_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (17 KB)
Download 'kabul_koh_e_safi_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (18 KB)
Download 'herat_e_2000_physical_ex2.jpg' (15 KB)
Download 'koh_e_safi_northwest_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (22 KB)
Download 'paghman_range_southeast_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (28 KB)
Download 'paghman_range_wsw_6500_physical_ex2.jpg' (32 KB)
Download 'sikaram_ne_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (32 KB)
Download 'tirich_mir_nne_ped_physical_ex2.jpg' (31 KB)
Preview of image 'kabul_nw_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'kabul_koh_e_safi_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'herat_e_2000_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'koh_e_safi_northwest_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'paghman_range_southeast_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'paghman_range_wsw_6500_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'sikaram_ne_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
Preview of image 'tirich_mir_nne_ped_physical_ex2.jpg'
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