Mapping Hacks

Make 3-D Raytraced Terrain Models #20

Chapter 2, Mapping Your Neighborhood

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85

HACK

Creating an application like NoCat Maps has become much easier in the last

three years. For starters, you no longer need to create your own custom geo-

coder to get the latitude and longitude of a particular street address; instead,

you can use geocoder.us, as described in “Geocode a U.S. Street Address”

[Hack #79] and “Automatically Geocode U.S. Addresses” [Hack #80]. One can also

lighten the load of the application quite a bit by using the

Geo::GDAL Perl

module from the CPAN to directly access DEM files, instead of having to

integrate with GRASS. There are plans afoot to improve NoCat Maps and to

publish a new version of the software under the GPL, so that anyone can

download and implement a NoCat Map database for her own community

network. We recommend checking http://maps.nocat.net/ for more details.

HACK

#20

Make 3-D Raytraced Terrain Models Hack #20

Convert digital elevation models into exciting scenes of rendered terrain,

using the free raytracer POV-Ray.

The free topographical map data from the USGS makes a fine candidate for

creating three-dimensional scenes of territory. The POV-Ray 3-D raytracer

allows you to easily import any image for use as a height field in creating a

scene with a ground terrain. POV-Ray is available in source code form, and

you can get binaries for Linux, OS X, and Windows from http://povray.org/ ...