I just started programming in Panda3d, this is my first project. It is Roaming Ralph with a digital elevation model made for arcGis with a satellite image overlay both ripped from the USGS seamless server. This particular area is my home in Eastern Kentucky. The screen shots are taken from various high altitudes. The other models are my first attempt to recreate some of the structures around here. I have a plan to add vegetation that are only rendered at certain distances so they won’t take away from the realism when afar. It may seem kind of pointless but I just wanted to see if I could do it.
sounds very interesting expec. for those interested in flight simulators - if you plan to share your code I guess lotta people here could be happy
keep up!
Sure, its not so much a code as a series of imports. GIS, especially arGis, has a lot of cool 3d landscape features. A lot of data and metadata can be found on USGS seamless including the dem files and satellite images I used here. I downloaded these in gtif format. To my knowledge Maya nor 3dmax can open these so I converted the dem using AccuTrans3d which has the ability to read a variety of arcGis formats and export them into practically any other format including obj and ma. I’m sure that arcGis can convert these too but it is an expensive program (about $10,000 a year, just a license you must renew every year). There are other local geonet services through which this data is available too. Another unfortunate problem is the dem files are only available in 7.5’ quadrangles and the largest satellite photos in 3.5’. Argis can superimpose based on transmercator coordinates, but without it the best way I found to sync the overlapping images is a simple cut and paste in photoshop. This is a round about method I know and there is probably a better and more direct way.
Hello! I know this is a long shot because this post is so old, but I’m a GIS student with Python experience and I’d like to use DEMs and possibly satellite imagery to create a 3D scene using Panda3D. I just got started with Panda and I was wondering how you converted your DEM to a format that is suitable for Panda? It would be really cool if I could set up the 3D landscape and even better if I could add shapefiles on top of it later on.
Any way you can help me would be greatly appreciated!Thank you for your time!
Get the greyscale heightmap from the dem.
Resize image so it is appropriate (power of 2 + 1 usually.
Use GeoMipTerrain in panda, load the greyscale image into it. You have terrain.
Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve looked at any of this!
I just happened to regain interest in game engines today. Anyway, as I recall: I believe I first converted the DEM as a TIN model in ArcGIS and then converted the TIN using a free conversion software I found online. Just search TIN to obj or whatever needed file extension.
Sorry, actually I see my last response from about 5 years ago tells mostly how I did it. The program AccuTrans3d, free I believe, can take a DEM and extrude it (probably similar to Croxis’ response). I believe the same program can take an ortho image and overlay it as a texture and the whole thing exported as the necessary format.
