CompuServe Messages

"an accurate terrain can be modelled quickly this way" You must be pretty impressive at this – holy smokes that sounds like a big job. I'm using a terrain modeller that takes ASCII data as xyz points, along with polyline (or ASCII) surface features like roads, rivers etc. (or contours) and creates a triangulated mesh over them. It then allows you to cut in pads, roads or other features (draw the road, specify depth to cut and width) as well as doing cross sections, volume calcs, etc. When the model is done, I drop a rectangular grid on it – with small enough grid spacing, I can get a fairly smooth appearing surface. Of course, there's the root of my problem; each grid square is a 3dpolyline which is (as yet) unclosed. Tried digitizing contours once (no ascii data available) but it was a 3 day affair, and the accuracy is still questionable. But maybe our files are somewhat larger. Sounds like you've got a pretty neat method figured out.