TransDEM Forum

Garry, I will offer the new textures as a custom texture set. You only need to select its colour/KUID mapping file in the custom texture field during export (and, of course, install the textures in Content Manager). I may also upload the texture assets of this new set to the DLS as they are intended to stay, to become part of the final routes.

I will not replace the default textures as TransDEM should make route generation as easy as possible for new users. As we all read in the forums, some people experience a good deal of problems familiarising themselves with the underlying concept. We should not make it more complicated. When working with ground textures only, the 20 standard textures with the 10m grid lines will remain the best option for a quick start.

I made a few more tests with 3D UTM tiles and ortho-imagery. The following example is Bonneville Dam, Columbia River, OR/WA state line, which I have used before to experiment and illustrate functionality.

The aerial photos used here are USGS "High Resolution Ortho-imagery". I chose those because they are public domain, no copyright issues in this case. However, they come in JPEG2000 format (.jp2) which TransDEM does not support.

(JPEG2000 is on my todo list for some time, but won't make it into upcoming TransDEM 2.5.)

For this test I manually converted the .jp2 image to ordinary .jpg, and ran GDALinfo to read the geo-referencing data. From that I created a "world file". Jpg image and accompanying world file were sufficient to obtain a geo-referenced image in TransDEM.

The DEM data is 1/9 arc sec. For this reason I created 3D UM tiles with 5 m resolution - which takes ages to produce. I also selected the "Draw Grid" option to get the 10 grid lines.

This is the rater small "layout", about 70 sq km:



A few impressions with these ortho-images. Resolution is 1 m per pixel here.








Interestingly, the drawing distance in TS12 for objects appears to be greater than the maximum 5 km you can set for terrain. Sam spot as before, but UTM tile layer switched off: