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3D Landscape Rendering Using USGS Digital Elevation Models (DEM)
You will need Windows Media Player or Quicktime to view the animation.
Click here to play a California animation (24.6MB).Rendering Landscapes with TruFlite
The picture above was rendered using the fully functional TruFlite demo. After you have installed TruFlite and TFMAKE on you computer, creating the image above should take about an hour. If you don`t have a fast internet connection it will take longer because two quite large files are downloaded in the process.
Instructions
- download and install TruFlite and
TFMAKE.
- For convenience rename "TFMAKE_30METER.BAT" as "30meter.bat"
and rename "TFMAKE_3ARCSECOND.BAT" as "1degree.bat"
- From a DOS shell, go to the directory where you installed
TFMAKE
- To download the data for the scene above just type:
1degree.bat -124 45
- This downloads the 1 degree DEM whose upper left hand corner
is (N45, W124), as well as the TIGER map of the same area. This
will take a while. If everything goes right, the batch file that
was doing the work should end without any error message.
- If the downloading and file processing done by the batch file
is successful, it will have created 3 file: "elevation.tga",
"texture.tga", and "scene.trf". You will want to create a
directory, perhaps "n45w124", and move these three files to that
directory
- When run the TruFlite program and open the "scene.trf" that
TFMAKE just created, you will see a screen similar to the one
below.
After you get it to work, experiment with the values in the column First Frame, you will definitely want up the Elev. z scale up to about 0.05 so that the hills and mountains stand out more. Other values you might want to change are the Size and the Grid. The grid values determine the number of elevation samples that are used in the rendering process. Some of the fields will have different values, but you should be able to select "Calculate", "Final", from the menu and the scene will render.The topographic features are more clear with a larger grid size, but the rendering process will take longer.
Below is the view I got with the values in the screen shot above.
Used with permission and many thanks to Ryan Foster@Oregon State University.
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