Before I became a cartographer, I spent ten years teaching wilderness travel at the National Outdoor Leadership School. I picked up GIS skills from a diamond exploration outfit in Canada’s Northwest Territories As a cartographer I split his time between topographic trail maps and doing historical mapping.
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The Wandering Cartographer 
Thanks for your efforts. Great job!
I’m trying to use Blender to make golf renderings. Does that make sense? It seems that your DEM files are for much larger areas. I have to presume that they exist for smaller topography as well?
Much obliged.
Alan
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Hi Alan,
There are many different resolutions of DEMs available, depending on where your golf course is. My favourite page that rounds up the sources for DEMs is http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html
I would think for something as small as a golf course even DEM at 1/3″ resolution (about 10m) might be too coarse. For finer detail, people usually fly a LIDAR survey (expensive!).
– Morgan
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Boy, that was fast! Thanks again. I have no problem acquiring the DEMS but opening/importing them in Blender is not possible afaik. Any assistance in that regard? TIA, Alan
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Well, it’s true: most DEMs come projected in lat/long, so to reproject and crop them for reading into Blender you’ll have to enter the world of GIS. QGIS (http://qgis.org) is your best option for a free piece of GIS software, but what you are talking about doing is a complex task. There are a lot of tutorials out there, but it could be a steep learning curve!
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Hello,
Would you happen to know if BlenderGIS will allow me to accurately convert these geotiffs? If not, would you happen to know of any open-source that will do the conversion to allow Blender to mimic geospatial software that does?
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/rdr_product_select#_ui-id-6
Regards
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Hi James,
I don’t think Blender has the ability to convert GeoTIFFs to any other format.
In general, the open-source software QGIS should be able to convert GeoTIFFs between projections. However I have no experience with digital terrain models on the moon!
– Morgan
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Hi, Are you available for consulting work? I could not find a contact form…
I’m an independent designer/developer working on a personal project involving maps and would love to tap into your expertise!
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Hi Stefan,
Sure! Please contact me at morgan@hesperus-wild.org
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