I need to develop a virtual tour of a national park in Malaysia. The plan is do recreate a forest with rivers and animals, and have a helicopter flyby through along the river.

I have scanned the topography maps but the problem I'm facing now is to digitise the evelevation data into Vue.
I have attached a sample of the map.
Does anyone know how or is there any other software which can convert scanned paper topography maps into DEMs or any other form of digital map.

Also, is this software suitable for this task?

Help is greatly appreciated as I'm new to 3D modelling.

Attached Link: http://www.derby-vi-service.demon.co.uk/real.htm

Hello, follow the address to get to my pages where I have done work like this. I have spent the last three months creating a huge model, which is why I haven't posted on the forum recently. If no dem terrain is available, you have to make your own, (dems are very low res anyway, and not much use for small scale work). Its best to work with greyscale images rather than dems, as you can manipulate greyscale easily in lots of programs. Your map indicates that you should be able to trace these contours in about a day. When you have created you model, you can also draw a mask of the water features, and using 'mixed materials', have 'real' water on your model. I have a flyby animation of one of my models in which the sun shimmers off the water. You cannot get your camera too low. Everything looks supprisingly 3d because of shadows on the original aerials, but below a certain angle it all goes flat. Please conatact me if you want more detailed information. I'll post a pic my latest model soon - found an unknown Roman road and associated bits using it. zoon@derby-vi-service.demon.co.uk

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=790159

The only person I know who could help you in this is zoon. See the link above. You always can write an e-mail to him in clicking on his name. Guitta

Wow, our messages just crossed:-)

There are no DEMs available for this area I'm working on. The map scale is 1:63360 The sample map I attached was just part of the larger map. The actual map is actually 4x3 of the attached map sample above. I need to combine several other maps to cover the entire national park area. The actual size of the national park in real life is 43x43 kilometres. The flyby will only go along the rivers so it wont be neccessary to render the outer parts of the park. The helicopter needs to be 200ft above the ground. Another question, can Vue accomplish this task? There needs to be trees, and moving animals in the flyby animation. The virtual park has to be as accurate as possible in terms of elevation height, etc. Is there any other program which can automate this process? Thanks.

I was involved in a similar project using 3DS Max a few years ago. It took quite some time to produce the map we used because, at the time, we had to create a grid based on the map data by working out the height of each point and then reshaping the surface to match it in Max. This took a few days to get just right. I recently reproduced the surface model creation part of the project in Vue just to see if I could. First I scanned the map into Paint Shop Pro. Then I went through the map and removed the none topological bits - if you can get hold of the topological layer of the map without anything else you can avoid this step. Then I filled in each of the contours with a stepped series of shades of gray. This dropped into Vue produced a reasonable, if a little stepped version of the terrain. To improve the model I took the image into Expression 3. Then I got expression to trace it, ungrouped the resulting vector image and tweaked the edges of each of the areas to get a smoother gradient. I reexported it as a graphic and brought it back into Vue where it now had nice smooth contours. Hope this gives you some ideas that might help. Mark

Your project seems hugely ambitious given that you say 'I'm new to 3D modelling', and 43 by 43 km in Vue down to individual trees and moving animals - I don't think Vue can do this, don't know that any single commercial 3D package can do this. To create my latest real landscape, using bitmap overlays, not real ground objects, I had to handle a quarter of a gig Corel Draw file for assembling the aerial pictures, which took 35 minutes to save. I can't imagine the size of the Vue file for the full model you are proposing. You would be better to aim at flybys of sections of the river, and then edit these together. Try modelling an area like you show on the map above, work out your techniques that way, and then see where it takes you. Please keep in touch, Zoon

I think it would be easier to rent a chopper and go film it. Sounds like a huge project. Even Lightwave would be strained at such a huge undertaking. Even if it can be done the quality may not be what they want. Getting it perfect will take tons of puter power. I would not take on such a project unless I got cash up front. It's too risky.

It would actually just be flybys along the river. And it doesnt have to be just one animated video. What was planned is to break up the fly bys to several areas. Now how do I make a forest cover on the terrain without having to plop each tree one by one? And having individual trees would take an enormous amount of time just to render a short 5 minute flyby. Help?

Look in the book for a tutorial for making terrain forests and also you may need to use alpha trees in the distance and then real trees on the flight path. You can group whole clumps of trees togeather render then make them a alpha plain and reimport them. There only 2 polys then per plain. There is tutorials here to in the FAQ on how to make those.

The problem i'm having right now is how to digitize the elevation data from the paper maps using some special software without having to trace each contour line as that would be almost impossible.

Attached Link: http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/gtopo30/gtopo30.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&as_qdr=all&q=+%22Malaysia+dem+%22&btnG=Google+Search Your not looking hard enough. 80 % at least of the planet is done at least in dem data. Nasa did the earth mapping mission. The dem data for that place exists you just have to look harder to find it. I got some of the pics from the nasa mission. I can't find the web site right now cause of microstunned tape worm of hell has got still big sections of the web goofed up. The data exists you just have to find the place where you can download it from.

Attached Link: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globe.shtml

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