I want to implement a rudimentary Google Earth type app using JOGL. Where can I find info on how to model hte earth, I need to map textures to the globe, ect.
Any Ideas I where Ishould start looking?
Thanks;
Krypto
Hi,
You draw a sphere, with quad or triangle strips and set texture coordiantes to match lat/long world coordinates.
To find an image to map on your sphere look at the Nasa blue marble page…
… it’s only the starting point of a long way!
If you want to use more high resolution data over larger areas you’ll have to learn quite a lot about “view dependent continuous level of detail surfaces”, streaming of terrain data and out of core visualization.
For an example of how this may be have a look at: http://globe.sintef.no/ You’ll find a few useful references in the documentation section http://globe.sintef.no/documentation/datasets.html. For another useful approach have a look at the “grand canyon demo” on the jogl pages.
I have also enyoyed the references found in the Vterrain pages: http://www.vterrain.org/
If you are interested in building an application over the top of such an infrastructure, you may want to check out the forthcoming X3DEarth project. This is a large project that is being driven by the Web3D Consortium to develop an open-standards based replacement for Google Earth. The initial technology release is targetted for this week at the Web3D Symposium and details should be up on http://www.web3d.org by the end of the week.