Short: 401 frames, flight over earth heightfield
Type: pix/mpeg
Author: Andrew Haveland-Robinson
Uploader: Andrew Haveland-Robinson

February 4, 1994

earthmpg.mpg is a 401 frame MPEG of a mercator projected height field of
the earth.

The earth's surface features are accurately modelled to 0.5 degree
resolution from a 720x360 height field.  The colour coded altitude contours
are approximated from a gradient colour map.  The sea varies from light blue
to dark blue to black, and the land varies from green to brown to grey to
white.  The surface features are *greatly* magnified, and very educational,
as the relative heights of the various mountain ranges and sea bed can be
clearly seen.  This file was originally 320x200 and 16Mb in size, a little
inappropriate for electronic distribution!  The animation is still under
development - I hope to produce a more detailed version for videotape.

For the anoraks...
3d-Studio was used to create the camera and light paths working with a low
resolution mesh produced from the height field.
A batch file was then constructed with the excellent 3ds2pov and 3dsani
programs written by Steve Anger.  An automatic search and replace utility
was used to modify 3ds2pov's output to include the height field data, and
rendered overnight with a Watcom version of PoV 2.1 on my 486/66 & 386/25.
The mpeg was created using cmpeg v1.0 written by Stefan Eckart
<stefan@lis.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> using this input line:

cmpeg -v1 -t0 ipb.ctl out%%05d.tga earthmpg.mpg
                        (^^ required under 4dos)

The height field data is obtainable from ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de
[134.106.1.9]  in /pub/dkbtrace/pics/earth.lzh
The earth data was converted to 24 bit targas for image mapping.

Thanks go to Frank.Neumann@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de for making the
raw images from the floating point data at hanauma.stanford.edu,
Eric Haines of Raytracing News, and to Ken Chin-Purcell for writing the
article publicising its availibility.

Enjoy...
Andy.

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[Editor's note: The earth gray image is still at the same site, but now
under /pub/pov-ray/pix/misc/earth.lzh   -Frank]