TerraLand - Photorealistic Terrains From Heightmaps Satellite Images [RELEASED]

The source of global satellite imagery in TerraLand is ESRI which obtains its data from multiple resources.

For full details on the coverage, view the list of World Imagery Map Contributors.

Note: We have been asked so many times about TerraLand satellite imagery source and its copyrights. As you know many plugins and softwares use Bing or Google Maps as their imagery source for publishing and offline data usage which is illegal unless you own a premium license. Obviously the data isn’t free as they spend a lot of money on capturing them and apparently they provide much better imagery resolution for some areas in comparison to ESRI overall while ESRI has better quality in some areas also.
We have chosen ESRI because it’s a public service, of course it’s holding its copyrights but provided in a more public and free to use condition.
Similar question has been answered in World Imagery" - can I use it? and as you see because ESRI uses multiple data sources so it’s hard to tell the exact condition in different areas.
Also TerraLand takes the downloaded image as the base a “reference” texture for terrain colormap used in far viewing distances and then by mixing it with “TerraLand-Enhancer” you add repetitive image tiles to bring details as the final visuals. This reference image can also be a Topo Map.

However, if you can prepare your own satellite images for the area of interest you can still use TerraLand-Maps to texture your terrain and place satellite images in their real world positions as described in TerraLand Maps Introduction. Check out the Online Help section of our website to explore products’ capabilities.

The Beta version has improved a lot and is continuing, some of the new features right within TerraLand GUI are as follows:

  • Search any address or location on Earth for terrain generation
  • Get geo-coordinates (Latitude/Longitude) of the searching location
  • Get Address of the inserted geo-coordinates
  • Image Preview of specified location for up to 1024 resolution from Google Maps
  • ASCII grid file reader for loading customized user created elevation data files
  • Preset Management to save load specified settings

For some reason I can’t give any screenshots for now here in forums but you can get the plugin as soon as your purchase made.