Real-world topographical data for terrain height map?

Unity Engine
1

Has anyone used real-world topographical data as a height map to build realistic terrain in unity? I’m looking around on the internet and see lots of sites with “elevation data” but have no idea about any of the formats and how to convert it to a greyscale height map.

For instance:

http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/
http://vterrain.org/Elevation/global.html

Thanks!

2

Which source of data are you looking to use?

I have used such data, most formats of data are documented on the web, basic DEM data is just a raw bunch of shorts that give the height, just search for the file extension to find out how to decode the data. I got so fed up with messing about with DEM files etc that I wrote a plugin for Max to make life easier and from that did some scripts for Unity to use the data it built or Terragen data, you can see a couple of examples below or on the thread at http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/157815-Real-world-Terrain-test

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