Great!

About Aster, still on research grade, the increase in resolution is significant, but there is a lot of noise and artifacts. Check a comparision I made
http://i.imgur.com/dQaLi.gif
At the end, you have to determinate what is more important accuracy or definition.

We are looking at CGIAR now. We have not made a final decision. We will need to come to with licensing terms with them as the data set is not free. I do not remember why we didn’t use it for v9; CGIAR is also revised so the properties of CGIAR now may not have been the same as what was available 4 years ago…we’re definitely looking at the current CGIAR now.

Re: ASTER – has it been processed yet, or is it still only ‘raw’ data that’s available? RAW unprocessed ‘research’ DEMs can be problematic.

Why not CGIAR directly?, all voids are already filled

The other possibility is to use ASTER, with a 30m resolution for the rest of the world…

The source is SRTM. For v9, we back-filled voids ourselves with our own filling algorithm and a composite of data sources; for v10 we will probably be compositing data sources again; we’re not sure if CGIAR will be one of them or not..it’s on the list.

If so, are you using the latest corrected version withouth the voids that plagued the first releases?

This is the latest correted version:
http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/

That is an astute comment! In fact we have looked at cases where we pick up a few triangles due to the order of operations (e.g. cut then triangulate vs. triangulate, cut, retriangulate might cut 6 tris to 4, which adds up when repeated a lot).

The main problem is one of code structure: a lot of times the polygons that are coming in are not guaranteed to be convex, which makes the cut operation trickier.

I do have a note to some day look at providing ‘native’ quad draping, because the quad case is the convex polygon case that comes up most where we could save a few tris.

But can’t you first cut the polygon into multiple pieces to folow the underlaying scenery , and then triangulate?
Mabey it would result into less triangles?

a enthusiast user of x-plane from the Netherlands

I believe that it does affect physics – that is, your plane will gain and lose acceleration as you go up and down hill, etc.

Ben,

Will the unevenness of a runway affect airplane physics (accel/decel) in any way, or is it just a visual trick?

It is only the same issue if the model was created with coplanar polygons…most of the time this is _not_ the case with airplanes. See my previous comments re: airplanes and zoom. It’s on my bug-fix list for v10.