Use Your Own Data as Basemaps and Terrain in the TITAN Viewer

Ryan at The Fiducial Mark has been busy hosting webinars such as "3D City Construction Workflows: From Collection to Presentation" and also making interesting posts showing how to make the most out of the ERDAS TITAN Viewer for modeling 3D urban spaces. In two separate posts he describes how you can use your own personal, local data as either 1. basemap or 2. terrain in the TITAN Viewer.

1. First is the post on Defining Your Own Raster Basemap in ERDAS TITAN:

Most virtual worlds have pre-cooked imagery that they serve up as their "skin of the earth" basemap. But what if I want to define my own default imagery, just for my own personal use?

Here Ryan walks easily step by step to show you how to turn your own datasets into basemaps in the TITAN Viewer. He added a picture displaying results:

2. Ryan deals in photogrammetry and highly accurate data. In another post he describes how terrain available in many virtual globes are too coarse and inaccurate to properly display 3D buildings extracted from photogrammetric processes. In a post on 3D Buildings and Terrain in Virtual Worlds Ryan points out that the latest release of ERDAS TITAN has a good technique for sorting out this problem by allowing you to specify your own local raster datasets as terrain layers:

In this case I processed my own digitial orthomosaic along with a terrain layer during the photogrammetric processing part of the project. I added the digital elevation models as layer, right-clicked on it and chose the "use as terrain" option....The result is that the (3D KML) buildings sit perfectly on top of the terrain.

Here's a screenshot of floating buildings:

And here's a screenshot in the TITAN Viewer with an accurate, locally added terrain source and the buildings sitting properly on the ground:

Thanks for the How-To along with the posts Ryan!