Short: Earth surface flight 320x200x401 Uploader: Andrew Haveland-Robinson Type: pix/mpg/space Architecture: generic Short: 401 frames, flight over earth heightfield Type: pix/mpeg Author: Andrew Haveland-Robinson Uploader: Andrew Haveland-Robinson February 4, 1994 earthmpg.mpg is a 401 frame MPEG of a mercator projected height field of the earth. The earth's surface features are accurately modelled to 0.5 degree resolution from a 720x360 height field. The colour coded altitude contours are approximated from a gradient colour map. The sea varies from light blue to dark blue to black, and the land varies from green to brown to grey to white. The surface features are *greatly* magnified, and very educational, as the relative heights of the various mountain ranges and sea bed can be clearly seen. This file was originally 320x200 and 16Mb in size, a little inappropriate for electronic distribution! The animation is still under development - I hope to produce a more detailed version for videotape. For the anoraks... 3d-Studio was used to create the camera and light paths working with a low resolution mesh produced from the height field. A batch file was then constructed with the excellent 3ds2pov and 3dsani programs written by Steve Anger. An automatic search and replace utility was used to modify 3ds2pov's output to include the height field data, and rendered overnight with a Watcom version of PoV 2.1 on my 486/66 & 386/25. The mpeg was created using cmpeg v1.0 written by Stefan Eckart using this input line: cmpeg -v1 -t0 ipb.ctl out%%05d.tga earthmpg.mpg (^^ required under 4dos) The height field data is obtainable from ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de [134.106.1.9] in /pub/dkbtrace/pics/earth.lzh The earth data was converted to 24 bit targas for image mapping. Thanks go to Frank.Neumann@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de for making the raw images from the floating point data at hanauma.stanford.edu, Eric Haines of Raytracing News, and to Ken Chin-Purcell for writing the article publicising its availibility. Enjoy... Andy. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Haveland-Robinson Associates | Email: andy@osea.demon.co.uk | | 54 Greenfield Road, London | ahaveland@cix.compulink.co.uk | | N15 5EP England. 081-800 1708 | Also: 0621-88756 081-802 4502 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ > Some dream of doing great things, while others stay awake and do them < [Editor's note: The earth gray image is still at the same site, but now under /pub/pov-ray/pix/misc/earth.lzh -Frank]