A few years ago I had read about someone who took USGS maps and converted them to grayscale and mapped them to Second Life terrain files in the RAW format. The technique required Photoshop and some hit or miss tweaking. The complexity of this made it a less than ideal manner for doing what is a very cool thing – creating geologically accurate terrains!
Thanks to the talent of Dr. Lopes, one of the OpenSim core developers, there is now an easy-to-use tool for converting digital elevation model files into terrain files.
As a former Corps of Engineers GS-12 ranked Geologist, this is an exciting development that should see good use in OpenSim and something I look forward to trying.
Thank you Dr. Lopes for your passion in all things OpenSim!
