7 replies to this topic

[David Medeiros]

I'm trying to experiment with TerrainSculptor (http://www.terrainca...errainsculptor/) which only reads ESRI ASCII Grid. I typically get my elevation data from either SRTM or USGS Seamless server both as GeoTIFFs. I've tried converting the GeoTIFF to an ASCII raster in Arc10 but it failed. I converted the GeoTIFF to USGS DEM in Natural Scene Designer and tried to convert that in Arc10 to ASCII but it failed also.

Does anybody here have any experience with Terrain Sculptor or a work flow for getting GeoTIFFs to ASCII?

[dsl]

Do you have global mapper? That works seamlessly but costs money. Maybe try the open source SAGA GIS for raster conversion.

HTH,
David

[David Medeiros]

No GM. I have MAPublisher and ArcGIS 10 (through work). I'm on a mac at home which limits my options somewhat although I do also have Windows running on Parallels.

I tried another workflow yesterday where you set up the raster dataset before importing the GeoTIFF to Arc and it crashed the system. I think it may be a bad GeoTIFF so I'll try again with another.

[dsl]

No GM. I have MAPublisher and ArcGIS 10 (through work). I'm on a mac at home which limits my options somewhat although I do also have Windows running on Parallels.

I tried another workflow yesterday where you set up the raster dataset before importing the GeoTIFF to Arc and it crashed the system. I think it may be a bad GeoTIFF so I'll try again with another.

Maybe you can do this with GDAL OGR. I'm sure that runs on the mac, but there might be more of a learning curve if you haven't used it before.
http://www.gdal.org

Or you could try and run SAGA in your windows virtual machine.
http://sourceforge.n.....0/SAGA 2.0.7/

[François Goulet]

I've tried converting the GeoTIFF to an ASCII raster in Arc10 but it failed.

Did you had an error message? I did it twice to play with Terrain Sculptor and it works perfectly (I'm on 9.3.1 though)

[David Medeiros]

I've tried converting the GeoTIFF to an ASCII raster in Arc10 but it failed.

Did you had an error message? I did it twice to play with Terrain Sculptor and it works perfectly (I'm on 9.3.1 though)

Depending on how I was trying to convert to Grid I either got an incompatible file type error when bringing in the GeoTIF or I ran the convert process and the tool failed after a few seconds.

I tried this again with a new GeoTIFF of Kauai at work. This time I successfully imported the GeoTIFF and then converted to ASCII Grid (through the contextual right click "save as new format..."). This created a GRID file but now that I'm at home I still can't load the file into TerrainSculptor. This must be work flow issue.

What was your exact workflow sequence after downloading the GeoTIFF?

[Bernhard Jenny]

Depending on how I was trying to convert to Grid I either got an incompatible file type error when bringing in the GeoTIF or I ran the convert process and the tool failed after a few seconds.

I tried this again with a new GeoTIFF of Kauai at work. This time I successfully imported the GeoTIFF and then converted to ASCII Grid (through the contextual right click "save as new format..."). This created a GRID file but now that I'm at home I still can't load the file into TerrainSculptor. This must be work flow issue.

What was your exact workflow sequence after downloading the GeoTIFF?

Please make sure you are converting to an ASCII grid file (not a binary grid file). A useful and free tool for converting DEM files is Landserf (landserf.org).

I hope this helps,
Bernie

[HK120]

You can convert GeoTIFF with opensource QGIS to .asc. Terrainsculptor can then open that file.