European Elevation Data for Terragen

After many years, there are finally better elevation data for the non-USA world.

In late 2003, the ASTER data became available for some areas. They were 30 m data with nice coasts and a lot of holes on the land, a complicated way to download them and, for some time, they were free. Then the SRTM (link has stopped working) data became available - a lower resolution than ASTER ones (90m) and with many problems for the first 2 years: Very bad coastlines, noise on any water area, holes and missing mountaintops. Now the coast and water problems seem to be fixed (version 2 or 3 - both seem to be the same: only water noise has been eliminated and coastlines straightened).

You may still find the original SRTM files (version 1) - don't download these as they have the original problems. If a preview image is available, look at it first. If there seems to be noise over bodies of water, they are version 1.
Some people, like Jonathan de Ferranti have fixed most problems with the mountains.

The SRTM ftp site above used to have HGT files, that worked better with 3DEM and could be converted to more accurate terrains.
Now, it seems that only GEOTIF files are available like the ones from the GLCF site. These files, when converted with 3DEM to TER, seem to lose their height data (in my experience and others') and it is a pain to convert the minimum and maximum height to approach real world values, in Terragen.

Before that, the only available data for the rest of the world, were the very low resolution (1km) DTED0 and GLOBE data. They can still be useful, if you want to map them on earth or render a whole continent, though that is not usually done with Terragen.

I had been trying to do something acceptable with these limited resources for years. Below you can see the best that I could do.

The software I was able to use and get the results below was Microdem TBII and 3DEM.
In the bottom right, you can see an image made with the new data.

This information is preliminary and will be updated as soon as I have definitive news.


This is how a GLOBE BIN file looks opened with 3DEM. It shows the area I used to make the image on the right.	This was the best image I could make with the GLOBE files. I tried to be realistic. Actual scale for a 257 terrain (the smallest) is 60 km, but in Terragen only up to 30 km will work. You can see the lack of detail in the beaches, at least in the larger size that is linked from the thumbnail above.

This is a side by side comparison of the two for the same area and at roughly the same scale. It seems that the DTED0 one is much more inaccurate, both in surface detail (it is too pixelated) and in height detail (there are fewer height differences and some land on the top right and bottom left is shown under the sea).	This is a render made with the newer SRTM files (GEOTIF format). A simple render without any textures, but still the difference in detail is obvious, taking into account that it represents a smaller area than the render above. It took me many attempts to manage to show the land without drying the sea, because of height problems. A larger version is linked to the thumbnail above.

If you want to pay (a lot), you might be able to find more detailed data. I have not taken this route, so cannot help you there. Prices equivalent to 5000 US dollars a piece are not at all unusual.

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