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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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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