Terrain in Conventional 3D Modeling Software

Most conventional, traditional 3D modeling software tools (3D Studio MAX, Blender, Maya, Softimage, etc.) have very poor support for terrain.  Most significantly, as of 2006, none of those package has an entity to efficient store a heightfield.  The only way to represent a terrain is with a very large number of small triangles, which must all be stored (and drawn during editing) as a brute-force polygon soup.  Support for geographic metadata and cartographic coordinate systems is virtually non-existent.

Importing terrain data

• Mega-Fier Terrain Plugin
  • $200 plugin for 3DS MAX. It pulls SRTM (90m or 30m) directly from the internet and automatically stitches it into a desired area inside 3DS MAX, with easy control of panning around.
  • The terrain can then be textured and exported (to Terragen .ter, BT, or Unity .utr); the Unity game engine seems to be the primary target.
  • It can also pull texture imagery directly from Google - sounds very convenient.
• Flight Studio
  • not a terrain visualization tool per se, but a converter between OpenFlight and 3DS MAX, part of the tool chain used by some in the Vis-sim field to produce terrain datasets
  • Was $1500 from Bluerock.  In March 2008, it was licensed by Autodesk for inclusion in 3dsmax 2009 and beyond.
  • a typical user would do this: 1. Pre-process raw terrain files into basic OpenFlight mesh files. 2. Bring those 3dsmax using Flight Studio, further processing is done. This can include creating LODs, adding terrain features such as roads, trees, water, etc. 3. Output is again into OpenFlight, for use in a 3D runtime.
• It's possible to import a few elevation formats (such as USGS DEM) into 3DS MAX with Okino PolyTrans-for-MAX, however the result is unwieldy with even small terrain grids
• One free utility is DEM2MAX, a plugin which claims to import USGS DEM, VistaPro DEM and GTOPO30 files, and create an "elevation object".  However, 3DS MAX does not actually have an "elevation" object; it has only a generic polygon mesh object.

If you know of other ways to import terrain data into popular 3D modeling software, please let us know.