Importing DEMs into Terragen 2 on a Mac

[macmapper]

Being one of the newbies here with Terragen (just got the license and xfrog plants last week), I was wondering what is the best way to get DEMs into Terragen on the Mac side?  From my understanding one needs to convert DEMs to .ter files, bmp files or targa files.    Are there options on the Mac side for converting or is there a way to directly import these now into TG2?   In the past I have used the excellent Natural Scene Designer which has gotten more powerful over the years. Version 5 released last year is really nice.  In fact, I think it would be a great rapid modeling tool before importing and rendering in TG2 which can to all the photo realistic rendering.    NSD can export a few file formats on the Mac side including USGS Dem formats.   I may ask the developer if he could perhaps build in the ability to export to .ter files if the file specs are available.   

In the meantime what is the best way to get DEMs into TG2 on the Mac?  I've read some of the old posts on this forum and looked elsewhere on the web but did not find anything really concrete and straightforward.


Thanks for any help!

[Megabeat]

Global Mapper works well under wine in linux so I think it wil work in OS X under Macwine.
Global Mapper is a good program to convert between DEM formats, SRTM, etc, to ter files.
Other option is to install a windows version under qemu or virtualbox, and then use Global Mapper, I don't know any native program in OS X to do job.

Mac wine: http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX

And Global Mapper: http://www.globalmapper.com

[inkydigit]

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6825.0
simpleDEMviewer for mac...can save files I believe you can load into terragen

[jo]

Hi,

TG2 can import some DEM formats, but aside from MOLA I don't actually know which ones they are. Hopefully Matt or Oshyan will chime in.

Regards,

Jo

[trailgirl]

Take a look at Landserf. It works on a Mac.

http://www.landserf.org/

Marcia

[Oshyan]

GeoTIFF is natively supported, available for free at http://seamless.usgs.gov/ The US is covered at 3-10 meter resolution, the rest of the world at 30+ meter.

- Oshyan

[macmapper]

Thanks.  This all helps!