Real-world height data
Author
Hi
I'm wondering if there is a source somewhere for real-world height data. Specifically I want a heightmap for South Africa. It doesn't need to be high resolution, 1000x1000 or 2000x2000 is quite fine.
anybody? :D
LoreKeeper
Does Google Maps already have the altitude information for a given longitude/lattitude? Ifso, you could get your data online. You can download the Google Maps SDK, create your own website that has such a map, plus a javascript to get these coordinates. Your application can call this script to receive coordinates.
Eventually you only do this once, to get all the data, and encode that into a heightMap image or something like that. This should certainly be possible, IF Google Maps already has altitude information... But maybe there are already ready-to-use maps for this as well...
Greetings,
Rick
Eventually you only do this once, to get all the data, and encode that into a heightMap image or something like that. This should certainly be possible, IF Google Maps already has altitude information... But maybe there are already ready-to-use maps for this as well...
Greetings,
Rick
Author
I'm hoping for a low effort solution, the type where I right-click an image and say "save image as" :)
If you don`t mind the copyrights, sure you can :-)
But, if I were you, I`d take the data that Nasa freely gives. Last time I browsed there, they gave away 90m resolution data. I believe USGS is the name of organization.
But, if I were you, I`d take the data that Nasa freely gives. Last time I browsed there, they gave away 90m resolution data. I believe USGS is the name of organization.
The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission is a good bet. It's a resonably high resolution mapping of the whole world, though only the U.S. gets the highest resolution. It's not bitmaps so you have to do a bit of processing.
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/gtopo30.html
These are DEM files for the entire globe (in sections). There are probably tools around to convert DEM to bitmap...
These are DEM files for the entire globe (in sections). There are probably tools around to convert DEM to bitmap...
You can get some pretty realistic results with GeoControl. Real life terrain is rather boring for games if you ask me. You can get a lot more interesting shapes by modelling the terrain yourself and this tool seems to be quite easy to use.
http://www.vterrain.org/ has a few links to different types of 'real' ground data. It also has links to a wide variety of rendering techniques etc - unfortunately its now become a bit dated but its still useful.
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