🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Slayton wrote:
> 
> Chris Ross wrote:
> >
> > Could someone point me to a shareware program that displays DEM's as two
> > dimensional gray scale images?  WIN95 or WINNT would be perfect.  DOS or
> > MAC OS would be okay.
> >
> > I've found one that displays in color, but gray scale is what we are
> > really looking for.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > -Chris
> 
>   If you mean somthing like the USGS DEM files on their web site, I
> always use Wilbur (http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html). It
> will read the DEMs and output the results to screen and to disk (BMP,
> PCX, TGA, etc.). Does spiffy color renderings (lighted type maps as well
> as pure color maps) and grayscale for those of you who don't like color
> (or want to output to a height field renderer like Bryce or VistaPro).
>   Let me know if you want this software to do anything else (I'm always
> looking for new ideas).
>   Joe Slayton

You could consider adding conversion to PGM (pixel greymap) format. 
Vistapro (and similar) will read a PCX, TIF or similar greymap, but the
heights are quantized by these graphics formats to 256 steps.  PGM has
the great advantage that the quantization is defined in the file - so
there's no problem with loss of resolution.

We recently wrote (for internal use) a DEM to PGM conversion/sampling
utility which we use in conjunction with Visual Explorer (which reads
PGM files).  As this will output in Vistapro format it's a neat way of
getting from USGS to Vistapro quickly without any loss of resolution. 

Kevin

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