8 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

Head on over to maps.google.com and check out their new terrain layer. Rather nicely done!

[Charles Syrett]

Head on over to maps.google.com and check out their new terrain layer. Rather nicely done!

Nicely done indeed. Google goes in closer than Virtual Earth, and has a crisper imagery, at least in the areas I checked....

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com

[peanut]

I am really happy with these new terrain tiles. I have set them as default on:

http://waterquality.lcra.org

and

http://crwn.lcra.org

Rich

[Charles Syrett]

Head on over to maps.google.com and check out their new terrain layer. Rather nicely done!

Nicely done indeed. Google goes in closer than Virtual Earth, and has a crisper imagery, at least in the areas I checked....

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com

I looked around some more. It's like the air photography -- sometimes Google is better, and sometimes Virtual Earth.

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com

[Jimbo]

Thanks I will find that information while I'm using Google for reference material on my project.

[Dale Sanderson]

Yes, the terrain is certainly aesthetic, but I find it difficult to follow a road through an area with lots of relief, because the roads are rendered in a gray color that's not much different than the gray shadows. I wonder why they didn't just use their familiar orange-yellow-white scheme for rendering the different road classes. But then, it's a new product, so perhaps refinements will be made.

[Matthew Hampton]

I find their relief very interesting. It seems they used different techniques at different scales (analytic hillshading, slopeshading, mixed illumination, etc.) I also find their use of tint intriguing. There seems to be several shades of green for parks, semi-urban area, forested areas, etc.

I'm wondering what dataset(s) they used...

[Charles Syrett]

I find their relief very interesting. It seems they used different techniques at different scales (analytic hillshading, slopeshading, mixed illumination, etc.) I also find their use of tint intriguing. There seems to be several shades of green for parks, semi-urban area, forested areas, etc.

I'm wondering what dataset(s) they used...

It's clearly a work-in-progress. I sampled two areas in Canada with which I'm familiar -- Nelson BC and Toronto -- and compared with Virtual Earth. In BC, it looks like both are using provincial data (TRIM), but Google seems to have blended vertical with oblique illumination. In Toronto, Google has a kind of knobbly surface that seems to say "wait, we're working on it", where VE has a very generalized obliquely-illuminated relief image, perhaps from the Federal 250K data. Just a guess.

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com

[BEAVER]

The terrain all over Canada looks really bad. Not to mention the lakes and rivers. I was going to do one map of Niagara Falls and gave up after trying to get files of Canadian side for two months. Glad to be in US.