Computer Generated Mountains. |
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| Most people will have seen Google Earth and many will have seen NASA's WorldWind. What you will find here is not real time but looks better (I hope). I use similar data to these applications but render them out with various bits of software to give animations and stills to illustrate the treks I have been on in many of the worlds mountainous areas. So far I have completed the areas shown below. | |
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The generated landscapes are derived from DEM's. These are Distance Elevation Models. Basically this means that for each point on the ground the altitude is given and the landscape can be constructed. The critical factor is the spacing of the points. The whole world is covered by a spacing of 1 Km but the 90 metre spacing has gaps. Even where the files are available, they tend to have holes where there was cloud at the time the measurements were made. High mountainous areas are even worse and all the high peaks seem to be missing. This is partly due to the high slope values that do not reflect the radar back to the receiver. I have patched these holes with the 1Km data but things get smoothed out and there is not the detail. Fortunately this problem has been overcome by Jonathan de Ferranti who has patched all the high mountain areas very accurately. He has made his work freely available at the link below. |
The tabs above will take you to the areas so far covered, Details of these renderings are given below. There are the usual photo comparisons and animations with lots of flash panoramas, some linked with hot spots.
There are no photo comparisons in the Ladakh and Mongolia sections. The pictures on this page were done with Jonathan de Ferranti's data and World Construction Set 6 (WCS6) and overlaid with Landsat photos. The Paine, Zanskar, the Nanda Devi trek and Everest stuff has generated textures instead of the Landsat overlay. The fly throughs are mainly wmv but the later ones are H.264 flash. I will eventually convert the wmv's to H.264 which renders better in flash without the need for Windows Media Player and the necessary plug in for Firefox. |
| The area in "Khan Tengri" shows the highest peaks of Pobedy and Khan Tengri. We flew in by helicopter and did day walks from the main base camp so there are no trek flyovers here but there are many panoramas and flights round these mountains and glaciers. For a video of the actual flight click here.
The methods used here are the same as the other areas covered by this page and in a similar format. |
All the data used to make these pictures is available on the internet free of charge. Finding DEM's and getting them in the right format can be tricky.
The animations are Windows Media. I have found that they don't always run properly in Firefox, in which case links are provided to download them. Newer ones are H.264 in a flash player. The panoramas are flash, so you will need the correct plug in to view them. The photo comparisons just use Java rollovers. |
Useful links are listed below.World Construction Set This is the 3D Nature site and shows what can be done with WCS and its big brother VNS.www.viewfinderpanoramas.org This is the site of Jonathan de Ferranti. Here you can download the patched DEM's of high mountain regions as well as read about how he does it. www.planetside.co.uk The home of Terragen a free terrain visualization programme. www.terrainmap.com Here you will find info on DEM's and related subjects as well as the Blackart programme for patching holes in DEM's. |
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