Making Landscapes There are two general approaches to generating images of landscapes with your computer. One is to use actually measured data of real portions of the earth (or other planets), and another is to synthesize your own data. Either way you end up (typically) an array of elevations, known as a heightfield (or displacement map, or depth map), which you can render with many programs such as the freeware raytracer POV-Ray (ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/). For real data, you'll typically get a DEM (digital elevation map) in the USGS (United States Geological Survey) format. There are a number of programs to convert this to eg. POV format, see below. There are several sites which carry DEM data free for download, see below. USGS also sells DEM data for most of the US. For synthesizing your own, there are several programs for instance "Terrain Maker" for DOS machines which has a graphical interface, or the Fractint (DOS/Unix) "Plasma" fractal type. Also there is my own "gforge" program for Unix/Dos (sorry, no GUI), which is simple but can still give you interesting textures. In the commercial category, there is a program called Vista Pro which seems to be quite popular, from Virtual Reality Labs Inc. Virtual Reality Labs ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 10SEP95: ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/incoming/utilities/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- dem2pov.zip Convert USGS Digital Elevation Model to .TGA heightfield dosdem.zip Utility to convert USGS DEM files to TGA tlwdem11.zip Utility to convert USGS DEM files to TGA v1.1 gforge-1.1f.tar.gz fractal landscapes 16-bit TGA/PNG/etc. heightfields hutil01a.tar.gz TGA/POT/GIF/etc. heightfield conversion/manip. utilities tmkr11.zip Random terrain generator/editor for use with POVRAY f-land13.zip 93/02/04, 9325 bytes Fractal landscape generator w/3D viewing (VGA) http://oak.oakland.edu:8080/SimTel/msdos/graphics/f-land13.zip 29OCT95: http://www.best.com/~beale ----------------------------------------- source code for Unix systems: gforge-1.2a.tar.gz 16-bit fractal landscapes for POV hutil01c.tar.gz heightfield combination and transformation utilities binaries (using DJGPP) for DOS systems: gforg12a.zip hutilbin.zip