Lasers and Light
Lasers and Light from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.
This is an animation that I put together at Wessex Archaeology for the Society of Antiquaries‘ Making History exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
I posted some more information about the animation over at the Wessex Archaeology Computing Blog, so I won’t repeat myself here!
Stu Eve, and 
Elena 8:23 am on 11 November, 2008 Permalink
Wow, a really intresting animation! I have too look more closely at it when I get to my own computer at home…
Stu Eve 10:14 am on 27 May, 2009 Permalink
Tom, this looks really great – I love the LiDAR. How did you put the animation together? What software did you use?
Tom Goskar 1:07 pm on 27 May, 2009 Permalink
Hi Stu,
I used GlobalMapper, ArcGIS, and Vue 6 Infinite to produce it. I had to do some cunning things to make Vue accept the full (<1m) resolution DEM – involving a fractal-based terrain. I wanted to avoid interpolation/smoothing as much as possible. I also had to introduce primitives into the scene to mark out the key features in the landscape to aid the animation, but tell the camera not to render them. This is because the OpenGL system in Vue (and my video card) can’t display the whole scene in the viewport – only a simplified version (way too many polys). There was a bit of trial and error, but overall I’m pleased with the results. Had I more time, I’d make a far more impressive version using the filtered LiDAR dataset, and generating trees in the right places…
Cheers,
Tom