Hello,

I need to put together a 3d rendition of a mountain for a travel guide animation. What are good ways to get the terrain data into Softimage, and where do I best get the data?

Thanks

If you have access to a x32 Softimage you could try Felix Gebhard's
Terrain Import which imports a whole lot of different terrain data sets...

this might be of some help

http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1435

Thank you for the links, guys!

I have found the data I needed in .hgt format. A program called 3DEM can read this format and displays the terrain beautifully. As soon as I've figured out how to export this as a height map, I should be able to bring it into Soft. Looks like this won't be as hard as I feared. Knock on wood...

Also give Accutrans 3D a try. You can import the .hgt files, create a 3D Mesh, decrease the polymount and export into many common 3d app formats (also .xsi)

Thank you for the tip, it may come in handy.

I already finished the project for which I needed the data, but I ended up having huge trouble exporting a 16 bit height map. 3DEM for example can't do this at all. There was some obscure Python program that supposedly could export 16 bit maps, but I couldn't get it to run. I spent hours trying different programs, but nothing worked. In the end I exported an 8 bit map, and thankfully the height level stepping was not too visible after I applied a texture.

hehe, i feel with you!
had all that trouble how to get real terrain data into xsi and checked so many different applications. my biggest problem was to get a large area, the alps, as a good, but not to high detailed map into xsi. so finaly i did it with accutrans3d and .hgt files for the close shots, the far away shots i made with ultimate maps downloader, saved the area as arcGIS terrain png and used it as discplacement map

did you try http://www.dubaron.com/yatt/ ?

maybe i should give it a try

to expencive for our project but dreaming how cool it could be: http://www.metavr.com/products/terraintools/terraintools.html would be fantastic to have such a software as a plugin

I don't think I did, even though I've definitely come across the name during research.