British Isles Map Service - download topology maps

[Adam H. Stewart]

I've just been handed the task of recreating the landscape of Bannockburn and Falkkirk for a special feature on the a blue ray disk of Braveheart. It's sort of what Oprah would call a full circle moment as I worked on the costumes for Braveheart back in the Curragh 14 years ago long before I ever dreamed of doing 3D, anwho I digress. I am looking for a way to dowload topology maps of the British Isles similar to the US National Map service here in States, I was doing research on similar type of project but for the Pacific and couldn't find map information for that area.

What would be killer is if you could download information straight from Google Earth but I seriously doubt that is possible ?

Thanks as always for you're help and remember :

"Fight and you may die. Run and you
will live at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now,
would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for
one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and tell
our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take
our freedom!"

[RErender]

With google earth pro you can create pretty high res textures http://earth.google.com/enterprise/earth_pro.html but without a 3D capture app (violates eula) there is no way to get the 3d data out. At my last studio we would create the textures from Google pro and get the 3D data from the USGS, doesn't help for Europe though. Looks like the best you can do for free is 1k data www.freegis.org some higher res here for sale http://www.cartographic.com/dems/ we used a couple opensource (I think) apps to convert the dem's to dwf with uvw's and varying levels of detail, if you end up going that route I can probably nail down the process.

[Neilg]

I used to work at a civil engineers and I remember using a website where you can buy cad os plans of the uk - including contour lines and heights on different layers.


This was 3 years ago - I have no idea what they were called though, I had the cad provided for me last time I had to do it in 3d...

[stef.thomas]

You can get os maps and height data from sites such as Promap.
http://www.promap.co.uk/promap/index.jsp

It's not cheap, but you could factor that into your fees. Obviously there are ways to grab the Google Earth data, but you could never use that in a commercial project.

[Neilg]

Ahh, it was promap that we used to use!

Always got the client to pay for it though.

[samuel_bubat]

I don´t know if the resolution is satisfying for your project. But you can download
SRTM (Height) Datasets from here
ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/ver...SRTM3/Eurasia/
As far as I know they may be used free as long as you give credits to NASA.
(But you better verify this)
They have a height resolution of ~90m. I think google earth uses
the same.

Use 3DEM (freeware) to convert them from .hgt to .dem.
Once a hgt is opened with 3dem hit F7 to optimize missing data.
This prevents spikes or holes in your mesh.
.dem can be imported directly into max.
But I strongly recommend you use the free "DEM to MAX" plugin
from Habware. Gives you a lot more option about resolution and various other things.
The Max default importer simply sucks (if they haven´t changed it in max2009 wich i don´t use)

If you need more accurate Data, contact your local Space Agency. The German
DLR for example offers 10m Data for parts of Germany but they are quite
expansive. I don´t know about Great Britain.

[Spikeadeliv]

Google Earth mesh import

You can import Google Earth height meshes and Aerial snapshots into Sketch-Up Pro or Microstation really easy, the hard bit is paying for either software!

Spike

[Adam H. Stewart]

Great guys - I knew this was the place to come for support - kicked it out of the park again. After talking to the producer we have decided to eyeball the terrain based off illustrations from trustworthy history book. I spent alot of time on Google Earth the two area's are pretty bland today, Falkirk has only one or two rolling hills and Bannockburn has a distinctive river or two but I'm thinking I can pretty easily model the base mesh. I'm planning to use modo for the basic mesh creation, the sculpture tools are pretty sweet and fast and then am going to experiment a little bit with world machine to do a little erosion - although the illustrated style I they are going for will probably work with more of that detail done in painted texture maps - another reason to use modo - unwrapping is super easy.

I'll look into sketchup pro - that definetly seems to be a way to go for other projects with more specific terrain - particularly Pacific for HBO that involves a more recent piece of history and is going to be excuted in am much more realistic style.

Thanks again for all you're help, I'm sure I'll be calling on you again sometime soon for you're giant 3D brains :]