Hi folks,

NASA recently posted an updated data set for the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This data contains elevation maps for most of the landmasses on the planet and is one of the formats that Ground Control can import into Carrara's Terrain modeler.

The big bonus in this update is that NASA also spent the time to figure out where the water was for those elevation maps and also posted this data. Until now there was no good way to use that data without a few thousand dollars in high end GIS applications.

This update adds a new shader to Ground Control that lets you read the shapefiles posted by NASA for the SRTM. Used as a Distribution shader for the Terrain you can add a water layer that goes exactly where the water does in the real world.

Please note, this is not a generic shapefile reader, it only supports exactly what it needs to read those SRTM shapefiles.

You can check out the tutorial on how to make all this work at

http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/tutorial.php?TutorialId=27

The update is available for Carrara 4 and 5. You can grap the update or download and try out Ground Control from the links below.

Carrara 5.0
PC
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/downloads/c5/groundcontrol.zip
Mac OSX
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/downloads/c5/groundcontrol.sit

Carrara 4.0
PC
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/downloads/c4/groundcontrol.zip
Mac OSX
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/downloads/c4/groundcontrol.sit

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Eric, Thanks for the update to GC and detailed information on how to bring in these maps! It was a fun little project to try, and now I'm hooked. Of course, living in Kansas, my first map was rather flat looking. ;-) Thanks again for the great information.

Chuck

Excellent Eric.