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Landscape Simulations
Sample Images There are many programs available that will display 3D digital elevation models (DEM). These programs will all work with the DEM’s provided free of charge by the USGS. Most of these programs can be downloaded free of charge from a number of sites on the internet. Once you have these elevation models, the challenge becomes how to place and display landscape features on these terrain models. That is where more sophisticated programs are needed. Most programs developed to place features on elevation models were developed for the gaming and movie industries. Those programs were developed to create scenes populated by virtually anything the user can imagine. They are not specific to creating natural worlds. As such they are very time consuming to use when creating individual scenes and do not work with real world data besides the terrain models. There are products available that do work with real world data either created in Autocad or GIS files. The Forest Service has even developed its own program designed to display 3D landscape models for the purpose of viewing proposed management plans. The programs reviewed were ones that had some application to the Forest Service. There are popular programs available such as 3D Studio and Maya that will create a scene, but these programs were really designed for the gaming and movie industry and as such are not as applicable to the natural resource field. These programs have the ability to create such a large number of features, from futuristic machine models to landscapes, that their application to the Forest Service is negated due to the large learning curve. One of the things considered when deciding what programs to evaluate was their design intent. The software chosen was designed to model natural world scenes. As such they provide vegetation model libraries and ways to place vegetation data sets. Programs with too much intent have too high a learning curve. Examples The following images were created during the evaluation of the software packages using the same terrain and GIS information for each project. The evaluator was not a professional with any of these tools and did not become completely proficient with any of them. Better results could probably be obtained through further training or use of the product. For a better understanding of the results that can be obtained with the products, the product websites contain examples of images that can be obtained by a professional. The purpose when creating these images was to test the software capability to use available datasets, the functionality of the software, and the ease of use. The images were all taken from the same location on the terrain looking at the same view.
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