Ever wondered how a 'mesh' is made?

[Timmo]

Just thought id share some photos of a quick trip i did up to Tauranga to check out a project we have going on at the moment.

One method of capturing large areas of very high resolution terrain data (I.e the raw data used to create a flight sim 'Mesh') is to use a method called 'LiDaR' (Light Detection and Ranging)

This uses the basic calculation Distance = Time x speed to measure the form of the earth. It does this by firing a laser at the earth from an aircraft and measuring the time it takes to reflect back to the aircraft. The exact positon of the aircraft is known by using real time differentially corrected GPS...so therefore the longer it takes to return the lower the terrain beneath the aircraft and vice versa. Its very accurate and picks up buildings, cars.....even birds!

Obviously this creates huge amounts of data so at the moment, the full potential for its use as terrain in flight sim is limited by the power of PCs......but you can obviously resample the data to lower resolutions.

Check out the photos here http://picasaweb.google.com/timbo.barne ... ngaAirport

There are some pictures of some quick visualisations using this kind of data here
http://z11.invisionfree.com/nzff/index. ... topic=1708

[Timmo]

Opps... i meant ever wondered HOW a mesh is made