creating a 3D terrain model. One of the TruEarth color base images can then be used as a texture map applied to the terrain model. Similarly, the elevation image can be used... along with the ocean. The matte images can also be used as displacement maps to create simple globe models with elevated land/ice masses. Land-only Mattes Like the land/ice mattes... additional resources to the user. The thirteen images include two shaded relief maps, a night lights map, an elevation/displacement/bump map, five geo-political boundary maps...

Storage? Virtually all authored terrain datasets originate as regular-gridded raster arrays of elevation heights (e.g., DTED s, DEMs, DTMs). Wavelets are extremely well suited... and correspondingly, polygon count reduction to achieve increased terrain-rendering display rates. The problem with TINed terrain models is that errors are created in the models... at author time, and vertices within the models must use world-space floating point coordinates because of their spatially irregular nature. The typical result is a single-LOD terrain model...