Attached Link: http://www.shadedrelief.com/drape/index.html

The reason I like the bitmap approach is that I have much better control over the data. My experience with importing DEMs into Vue is that they have a HUGELY exaggerated jump in vertical scale. You have to completely then GUESS at what the real vertical scale should be. But I'm not a GIS Professional- I do these terrains for artistic reproductions (which most people here probably do- one terrain at a time.) I can see that by importing multiple DEMs that you could build up a larger terrain set- but then they would still all be wildly out of vertical scale- from my experience. The concept of importing tiled BITMAPS would work better- as from my experience bitmaps don't have the radical vertical scale that DEMs have when imported. I would sure like to know how you get around that problem... What would be GREAT I think is something like a GeoTIFF which can be accurately draped with a satellite image (Landsat, etc.) I've seen the ShadedRelief.Com website and I would like to do the same thing in Vue (see link). Tom Patterson, U.S. National Park Service, also seems to be a fan of using imported bitmaps (PGM) as the way to go about this, rather than the DEM import. Even in MicroDEM the author is not wild about the variations in DEM scales. Seamless NED is the best way- but are you converting it back to a DEM?