Im trying to find this kind of data for various scenes Im producing. The terrain would definitely add to the final animations without too much modelling required. Any ideas where to find this kind of data ?
As an aside you could look at a very cheap program called geocontrol and another called world machine - very quick to learn and produce great results.
try these - 10-meter DEM files in the Yakima 1° by 2° quadrangle
I think they’re the same ones we’ve used. took us ages to find good ones so looking through my history isn’t helping much. I think these are good though.
if you don’t mind spending a little. (i think around $350 or so). you can get global mapper.
it has a bunch of free and paid locations to download worldwide aerials photos, terrain data, etc…
and you can also use it to create new co-ordinate systems to move real-world data to 0,0,0 and make it usable in max.
its also a great programs to import any gis data and export as anything else.
here are some free sources for worldwide terrain models.
Aster Gdem
http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/gdem.asp
1.5 arc second resolution
srtm
3 arc second resolution
much easier to get via global mapper. but you don’t need it.
Thanks for the links. Very useful.
A new terrain plugin for 3ds max just came out the other day:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=59&t=1074117
I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but it looks promising.
Looks interesting. I think though that there are some limitations with the 64bit version. Might wait to see if things improve.
Edit: Just read the 2nd page…looks like this isn’t an issue any more 