I posted this short demo on another website a few weeks ago. With the increasing interest on this forum for using Google Earth tiles and DEM's in Surveyor, perhaps it should be here as well...
I've been meaning to post some shots from Surveyor in the interest of demystifying the process I've been using to model a region that is on the other side of the continent from where I currently reside. The DEM's I'm using are SRTM2 DEM's, produced by the space shuttle, and available for free from the USGS online. I believe they are the highest resolution ones available outside of the military. I may be wrong about that but...anyway...they are pretty darn good! I use geophil's excellent payware utility TransDEM 1.2 to generate boards and Google Earth tiles for Surveyor. Here are some screenies showing how they work:
This first one shows a portion of the map facing northwest with Iona Island across the Hudson and tiny Fish Island in the foreground. The tiles are hidden beneath the board. Since they are no longer needed, I have used erazor to remove any vestiges of the original HOG textures from the map in the interest of conserving framerates. (NOTE: This is the same area of the route as shown in the more recent screenshot above.)
The elevation of the tiles is adjustable like other scenery objects. Here I've raised one above the surface of the board and you can see that Fish Island is, indeed, where it is supposed to be.
After lowering it a little, you can see how the track is laid right on the tile. It is helpful to turn the wireframe view on and off when placing track, roads, and other objects on the map.
Finally, here is a shot with the wireframe view on and an adjacent tile raised level with the foreground one...just like a big jigsaw puzzle!
Cheers,
Fred
