One more brief post on Terrain Bender, a program that lets you create varying-perspective terrain views, analogous to what you get looking from an airplane window: straight-down for nearby terrain, an oblique view for terrain further away:
But you can flip that analogy around 180 degrees, and use Terrain Bender to generate a “horizonless projection” view. This got a lot of attention a few months back, based on this pretty cool view of Manhattan using a horizonless projection:
With a little work in Terrain Bender, you can get a similar terrain perspective. If you open the sample Alps data set in Terrain Bender, you get this default view:
Using this default convex bending curve:
Straighten out the bending curve like this:
And you’ll get a classic oblique perspective view:
Change the bending curve into a concave shape by dragging the control points; adding some additional control points by clicking on the curve helps with control:
Some of the terrain at the far extremity will be distorted, but by modifying the viewing distance and angle, you can view mainly undistorted terrain in a quasi-“horizonless perspective”, similar to the Manhattan map:
This was a quick first attempt; I should be able to do better by playing around with the bending curve and viewing angle/position a bit. If you can find a terrain model that includes buildings, and can convert it into ESRI ASCII grid format (*.asc), you might be able to produce a map that looks very similar to the Manhattan one at the top of the post. Also useful for creating maps of Ringworld, Halo, Rama, and O’Neill colonies.
Related posts:
- Varying-Angle Terrain Views With Terrain Bender
- Converting DEM Files To .asc Format For Terrain Bender; Creating Matching Raster Overlays
- 3D Perspective Views With 3DEM
- Animated Flybys Using 3DEM
- VRML Worlds Using 3DEM
- Stand-Alone Map Projector Viewers II – map projection
- Online Map Projection Viewers II – A Great One From Brazil
- Viewing Map Images In Microsoft's HD Viewer
- Two More DEM Format Converters
- Stand-Alone Map Projection Viewers III – MicroDEM
- Make Your Own Map Projection With Flex Projector
- High-Resolution Sea Level Rise Effects In Google Earth
- An Advanced Alternative To Google Street View
- Animating Sea Level Rise In San Francisco With Vector Overlays In Google Earth In One Word: Don't
- DEM Terrain Depiction Using 3DEM
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