RE: ElevationGrid

["Crispen, Bob" <Robert.Crispen@HSV.Boeing.com>]

> Neil Woodhouse[SMTP:N.Woodhouse@earth.leeds.ac.uk] sez:
> 
> >[.....]This is the kind of thing an authoring tool should do for you.
> You note that there are too>ls out there to create height field image
> files--it just as easy to go the other
> >direction.
> 
> Prismatic Booger
> 
> Yes, that's fine, but i want to see it within the VRML spec. I don't
> want to be spending hundreds of dollars/pounds on authoring tools that
> aren't *truly* spec compliant. I'm again thinking about the end user
> here, which in my case is the student who wants to use VRML as a
> geographic/geologic  project.
> 
I think I'm catching the glimmerings of an idea here.

Modelers tend to start with geo data files the
way they start with DXF or 3DS or OBJ files:
the file is a *resource*, but it's only something
that *goes into* the final file which is a VRML
wrl file.  It's the final VRML file that's kept and
is the valuable asset.  That is, I'll take a DXF
or DEM file and convert it to VRML 1, then apply
LODestar to it to decimate the mesh, then
convert it to VRML 97, run it through unnormal
(to get rid of unneeded normal fields), vwaif
(to get rid of extra characters) -- and when
I'm happy with the final VRML 97 world, I'll
keep that file and toss out every one of the
intermediate files, including the DXF or DEM
file.

I think I'm hearing a very different paradigm here,
and I wanted to get a little reality check.  I
believe I'm hearing that the valuable asset,
the one that's kept, is the geo file, be it DEM
or height field image map or whatever.  The
VRML file is only the *means* of viewing and
sharing and combining for analysis the geo
data, and at the end of the day the VRML file
may be discarded.

If that's the mental model, then no wonder that
a solution which is intuitive to modelers (a
set of conversion tools) is unsatisfactory.

So (and the answer to this is probably domain
specific) are VRML files permanent assets or
simply means to view the real assets?

Bob Crispen
bob.crispen@boeing.com