Request for .ter or DEM files

[domdib]

Dear terrageners,

Does anybody have lying around either .ter files or DEMs of the following mountains?
Everest
K2
Denali (Mt McKinley)
Mount Elbrus
Mount Kailas
Mount Damavand ?

If so, would you be willing to share, to save me the time-consuming task of digging these out of SRTM data?

Many thanks,

Domdib

[bigben]

I can get you SRTM3 TERs for Everest and Elbrus.  Not sure what data I've got for Alaska.

I've generally avoided Everest as 90m data doesn't really do it justice and it would take a lot of extra work enhancing the terrain.

[domdib]

Thanks bigben, I had a feeling you might have some of these up your sleeve. If the files are too big to email, I can PM you my online file store. I'm not too worried about high quality, as the images would probably be from far enough away, plus I'll be putting some snow on top too. IN other words, extreme realism isn't the goal.

[bigben]

I'll publish them on my website and post a link here.  It'll have to wait until next week as I have a few gaps in my data and unfortunately the SRTM3 datafiles don't seem to be there anymore, possibly related to the release of SRTM4?  Downloading a few files of the new version to see if there's any noticeable diference. 

[bigben]

Uploading a beta terrain set for Mt Elbrus (ie. I haven't fully checked it yet, but it looks OK)

2 terrains, 90m and 250m resolution and 1 tgd file to load the composite.  The outer terrain may not have elevation data over the entire file.  No bathymetric data for "inland" seas, but the Black sea is there.  I'll post a blue marble texture later when I formally release the set.

http://www.bigben.id.au/terragen/files/terrains/eu/elbrus/

[domdib]

That's fantastic!. Thanks for this.

Incidentally, I have a .ter of Kanchenjunga and the surrounding mountains that I'm happy to share with anyone. It's pretty large, as I wanted to set the mountain in its surrounding context.

[bigben]

Had a bit of a search along the Himalayas for some other interesting areas.  Apart form the traditional high peaks, Namcha Barwa also looks quite interesting from the west and north.  The drop from the peak to the river in the pic below is 5,000m.

[domdib]

You're right, that does look rather nice. In case you're wondering how I selected the list of peaks, it's from the list of peaks by topographical prominence on Wikipedia. And in particular, Mount Damavand in Iran, which I'd never heard of before, is an almost perfect cone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Damavand

[bigben]

I also had a look through that list last night     Klyuchevskaya Sopka is also a pretty good set of cones

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=56.066667,160.633333&spn=0.1,0.1&t=h&q=56.066667,160.633333 and click on one of the photos.

The hole filling of data in the Himalayas is a real problem.  In the case of Namcha Barwa nearly all of the upper regions of the peak have been hole-filled reducing the effective resolution down to 200m or lower, requiring a lot of extra work in TG.

[domdib]

Have just started playing with the Elbrus file, and it looks pretty good. Thanks again!

By the way, I took a look at the network of nodes you used to blend the two heightfields together, and it looks pretty darned complex. I assume that's a standard technique you're using - I hope it wasn't created just for me! How the heck did you figure it out?

[bigben]

No, it was created just for me    It's a standard mask I made up for tiling terrains. It may look complex but the math behind it is extremely basic. A mask is created to match each of the TER files and then it's just set theory to combine the masks in a way that the sum of all masks at any point always = 1.  I find it a good example of the flexibility of TG2, combining real data with functional masks to provide very large terrains sets with an optimised RAM cost.

With only two terrains, the subtract scalar and combined mask node look tlike they overly complicate things but whe you get many overlapping terrains it all comes into play. (Screengrab is from the NZ terrain set I'm working on)

[rcallicotte]

Gosh, I haven't even started playing with the New Zealand files yet, Ben.  COOL.