welcome to the
Virtual Terrain Project

Support the VTP

Some VTP
Demo Worlds:

New York City

Hangzhou, China

Hawai‘i

Black Rock City, NV

Community:

The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.

This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing.  VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms.  VTP writes and supports a set of software tools, including an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro).  The tools and their source code are freely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.

To learn more about VTP and the field of virtual terrain, use the subject headings below.  You can also download the VTP distribution.

About Virtual Terrain
  Uses and Hype
  Tourism, Planning
  Small Terrain Areas / DTM
  Long-term Goals of the VTP
  Community, Media
  Data Openness

Elevation
  Data Sources: DEM, DTED
  Global Datasets: SRTM
  Bathymetry, Artificial Terrain
  Caves, Contour Data
  BT Repository

Ground Detail
  Imagery:
    Formats, Satellite, Aerial,
    Whole-Earth, Free Sources,
    Commercial Sources,
    Processing Multi-band Images
  Geotypical, Ground Cover
  Large Textures in Hardware
  How to Apply Textures
    Spherical Textures
    Detail / Blending

Rendering
  Level of Detail (LOD):
    Papers, Implementations
    Spherical Grids, Paging
  TINs: precomputed, runtime
  Light & Shadows, Dynamic Range
  Sky / Atmosphere, Clouds
  Water, Fog, Rain, and Lighting
  Performance, Navigation
  Draping

Culture
  Roads / Rail and Fences / Power
  Buildings and Cities:
    Procedural Buildings / Roofs
    Research and Projects
    Commercial Services
    Commercial Building Data
  Culture Classification
  Vehicles and Traffic
  Geocoding
  Flight-Sims

Plants
  Overview
  Research, Books and Papers
  Software Tools / Xfrog
  Distribution on Terrain
  Geometric Modelling
  Creating Plant Texture Maps
  Plant Images and Databases
  Forestry

The VTP Software
  Implementation and Development
  Vegetation, Plant Library
  Libraries: vtlib, vtdata
  File Formats: BT, VTST, VF, Loc/VTAP, ITF
  Documentation, Screenshots
  Applications:
  Enviro, VTBuilder, BExtractor
  Internationalization

Other Terrain Software
  Commercial
  Noncommercial
  Government / Academic
  Artificial / Artistic
  Location-specific
  GIS, CAD, 3D Modeling
  Games, Defense, Simulation
  Virtual Tourism
  Software Utilizing the VTP
  Earth Viewers chart

Modelled Areas
  Overview
  United States: California, Hawai‘i, Nevada, New York, Washington
  International: Africa, Asia, Australia, Costa Rica, China, Canada, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Middle East, New Zealand, North America, Central America, Romania, South Africa, South America, Spain, Switzerland, UK
  Beyond Earth