BTW Almost forgot Terrain by God (Navajo Mountain Utah) Data by USGS ;0

And you want to improve gods work? For me this looks not artifactional at all, only intersting. So maybe you point out where the problems are for you.

Except its Mt Rainier

Well, my feeling is, that this is diffcult to avoid - if it is in the original datas (god is smoother in this case). How can any filter know what is still wanted and what is an artefact? But you can try "erosion" in the terrain editor. There you can smooth whole terrains - or you can try to smooth parts of the terrain with the brush, using "effects" and select one of the erosion effects.

Its actually a function of the bitmap resolution - the stepping is from a transition from gradations in the 255 available shades from black to white. I'll try the erosion but I was hoping someone may have a way to break them up using a material or function. I see what you mean though about the filter not knowing the difference. I've also tried resampling the image but I can't seem to find anything out there that does a decent job of resampling. Thanks Bot

Do you have Photoshop? There you have all sorts of smoothing things. "smear", soften, "gaussian ..." etc etc. It's a little difficult for me to point exactly to the right menu items, i am using german versions of most of my programs. I mostly wanted to prepare the terrain for people maybe can help you more than i can. Let's see what MightyPete for example has to say - if he is around these days.

I can break it up some with smear but the basic problem is that the value of each step has only one thing it can do - either blend up a step or down a step but not in between. The effect is like pushing the step around to a different position. Terrain models like this are huge and so when I get down low the resolution of the picture begins to become apparent. I can duplicate the terrain, position it in the same position of the original and then half the resolution. This helps but then I start loosing the photo realism of the rendered image. I can move the light to a front position but part of the "realism" is the moody lighting. I'm rambling on now aren't I? Sorry. I'll try some of the things you suggest though - I didn't try soften - and when I figure it out post it. I hope Vue is considering 10 bit graphic options - I love the program. Thanks again Bot

Ok, i see the problem now. Smoothen may be an option. Or as i said in the first time, do it by hand in the terrain editor with erosion. I can't see another option really. I rhink in fact one of the things here as well is, that those datas are rasterized anyway. And now i am at the same point you are probably. The intension is to load the datas into a modeling program like Cinema 4D, Amapi etc and smooth it there, to give it back to Vue as a 3DS file for example. But you will run into other problems when you try to do something like this, i am sure.

I'm not familiar with C4D or Amapi but the top image is part of an animation that has somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million polygons. I'm not great at 3D studio but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to make a model that size in 3DS it would crater discreet logic and we'd never hear from them again. In my experience Vue is the best at this sort of thing. In fact I don't think 3DS can even import or export a model over 65,000 polys and if you try to export a 3DS file over that size in Vue you will get an error. I'm sure I'll figure it out and I'll let you know how it goes. Bot

Maybe use a Photoshop technique where you bring the image in to Photoshop, duplicate it, blur the bottom layer to smooth it out, then paint a mask to show the blurred part through where you want it. Just an idea. Hope it helps. Frank

Yeah, i think 50 mio polygons will kill every software. So the only way is bluring in Photoshop or in Vue terrain editor. Or go out with a camera :-))

Yep, I think blurring will be your best & easiest option. The only thing to think about is how much blur to add, not enough and stepping will still be apparent, too much and other detail will be lost. My suggestion would be to make several copies and blur them to different degrees from barely noticable to quite severe, and see which works best. It will depend on the original's resolution as well. BTW, where did you get the image?

Which image?

Oh, I mean data : )

USGS 7.5 meter (not seconds)dems converted to grey scale. The dems are at this lame site http://data.geocomm.com/dem/demdownload.html that the Feds let sell publicly produced data as long as they provide some data for free. Naturally they throttle your downloads as much as they can get away with to encourage you to buy bandwidth. Fortunately many states have their own sites for GIS pros and state employees and departments. Utahs FTP is here somewhere (I have the link on an unavailable puter) http://agrc.its.state.ut.us/ or http download here- http://waterrights.utah.gov/cgi-bin/quadview.exe I don't have time to search to much but this should get you started. Some day I'll put together all of this info on doing real world terrain stuff and include it as a tut if it seems there is any interest in it. FYI I generally don't bother to much with using VUE's dem import due to the fact that there are so many different types of DEMS vue will only handle one or two types. Best to get MicroDem and 3 DEM (both free ) http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/microdem/win32/ and learn how to prepare the data outside of VUE and import it in. Thanks Bot