Terrain editing

[johnt200202]

I come from a GIS background where it's unusual to edit elevation data (DEMs) on the fly as you do in Terragen (or even photoshop).

I was hoping you could help point me towards a quick method for editing ascii elevation data. These are generic text (.txt, sometimes .asc files) rasters that look like this:

ncols         1000
nrows         1000
xllcorner     451000
yllcorner     340000
cellsize      7
NODATA_value  -9999
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.......

I want to edit mine using graphic manipulation techniques. At the moment my workflow is laborius:

- create terrain in terragen
- export as .ter
- open .ter in landserf
- export as arcgis text dtm
- open in arcgis (to get rid of landserf's funny decimal places)
- export to raster ascii again
- open in my custom program (for mobile phone handsets)

Ideally I'd like a program that could open ascii rasters, manipulate them, and save them. Does anyone know of a terrain/world builder that uses this ascii format?

Thanks

[Tangled-Universe]

I have absolutely no clue about these kind of applications etc., but maybe 3DEM will work?

http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html

Martin

[Oshyan]

The two applications I know of off hand that can directly load ASCII data and then edit it are Daylon Graphics Leveller and GlobalMapper, neither of which comes particularly cheap. Wilbur is free and may be able to load that data. 3DEM is also free and I believe supports ASCII and you could use that to export to a Wilbur-compatible format (or one that any other app could use for that matter). Other options for generally good terrain editing, though they may not have ASCII import support, are World Machine, Geocontrol, and L3DT.

- Oshyan

[johnt200202]

Thanks guys. Global mapper looks really comprehensive, and can handle the ESRI ascii format.

[Oshyan]

Global Mapper is superb. It's pricely, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

- Oshyan