CityBuilder will read in elevation files and save them to a simple binary terrain format (BT). You can load multiple files, merge them, and select the area of interest to export.
CityBuilder can import elevation grid data from these formats:
- USGS DEM (Digital Elevation Models)
- SDTS DEM
- MicroDEM DEM
- several less-common flavors of DEM
- GTOPO30
- DTED0 (DTED1 is untested)
- CDF/netCDF
- image formats: PNG, TIF, GeoTIFF
- PGM ("portable graymap format")
- Surfer 7 Binary Grid
- TerraGen terrains
- raw data without a header
- ArcInfo Ascii Grid
- ArcInfo BIL (includes NOAA Globe files)
- several other formats
If any of your terrain grids use different coordinates (such as different UTM zones), CityBuilder can convert them to the same projection for you.
The native format for elevation grids is the BT format. BT can be read by the tridicon™ CityDiscoverer CityDiscoverer program and other virtual terrain software.
CityBuilder can also export elevation to ArcInfo ASCII Grid, GeoTIFF, TerraGen, BMP, STM, MSI Planet, VRML ElevationGrid, RAW/INF for MS Flight Simulator, ChunkLOD, and 16-bit PNG. However, format conversion is not the intended use of the software. The primary purpose of CityBuilder is to prepare data for 3D visualization.
Additionally, CityBuilder can import TIN elevation from these formats:
- AutoCAD DXF
- ESRI TIN (tnxy.adf)
The native format for TIN data is the ITF file format. ITF can be read by the tridicon™ CityDiscoverer CityDiscoverer program for visualization. Unfortunately, there is no common standard file format for TIN data. That is why we had to invent our own ad-hoc native format (ITF).
The default is to display elevation as artificially shaded and false-colored by elevation. Elevation at sea level is shown in blue. Areas of unknown elevation are shown in red, unless hidden with the View: Hide Unknown Areas option
hawaii_1k.bt |
hawaii_1k.prj |
/Data/Elevation/Foo.ini
, then that
file will contain a description of the tileset, and all the tiles
will be placed in a directory called /Data/Elevation/Foo