This is probably a little premature, because it's not yet available for many areas, but Martin (Tangled-Universe) brought to my attention that the USGS now offers
1 meter resolution DEM data, which is just incredible. The old high resolution standard was 3 meters (the USGS refers to it as "1/9 arc second NED"), which I've used quite a lot, most frequently with the St. Helens scene that I've been iterating and varying on for years.
Anyway, this new 1m data has a very limited availability, but that was also true of the 3m data for a long time. So with that in mind, although you can't find a lot of it yet, I wanted to demonstrate how much more detail we can see. And, of course, Terragen loads the data easily.
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These two images are default shading, no "Fractal Detail" added. I think the detail difference speaks for itself. This is an area outside of San Diego. The Grand Tetons are also available, as is "Glacier Peak" in Washington. Those seem to be the most interesting areas so far, while many others are potentially boring, places in the mid-west, or New Orleans, etc. But this will probably change with time. So keep your eyes out for more of this amazing terrain data!
All data is available free here:
http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic/- Oshyan
