Terragen Templates for real world region -SF Bay Area

[kmoreau893]

Hi

I'm a filmmaker and I would like to know if there are any resources, either commercial or free that would allow me to animate a real world region, specifically the San Francisco Bay area. I've been doing mockups using Google Earth, which is good but I find it can't generate smooth animations or fly throughs. The good part of Google Earth is I can fly to any area and get a good static picture, it's just that the motion isn't good enough.

I've seen a number of posts which suggest importing GIS information, and this is good, but there are a lot of buildings and other elements that would need to be created.

I'm wondering if a Terragen 'model' of regions exist. Thanks very much for any advice. Regards,

-Keith

[neuspadrin]

If you can find a obj file of the buildings you need, or find a way to convert some into obj, then you can import into tg2.  As for landscape, you can import geotiff from usgs seamless of the area you want.

I'm guessing main thing you would want is the bridge, which im sure theres 10000000s of models out there of it.  As for other buildings you could prob find a group of genericish buildings to use.

[Oshyan]

San Francisco actually has a number of fairly iconic and recognizable buildings (e.g. Transamerica Building). So getting the right models, or at least a few key ones, could be pretty important.

If Google Earth already has enough of the right models, you might be able to find a way to convert those into OBJ so that TG2 can use them. There is a recent thread here about a Google building modeler that also discusses their object repository, where OBJ output seemed possible: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7775.0
Here's one model, which you'd have to convert:
http://www.planet9.com/demos_launch.html

For the terrain you would probably use freely available USGS DEM data: http://seamless.usgs.gov/ Ideally you would get it in GeoTIFF format, which TG2 can load directly. The San Francisco area should be available in a fairly decent 10 meter per pixel resolution.

- Oshyan