3dMapper is all about landscape visualization and mapping from a bird's-eye or ground-level view. Think of it like a digital stereoscope, where the terrain rises vertically out of a horizontal plane. Mouse movements allow you to quickly rotate, zoom, pan, and scale the image. Synthetic lighting (hill shading) can be added to emphasize terrain subtleties, and the vertical dimension can be enlarged or shrunk to any value. We call it 3dMapper because you draw lines and digitize points directly on the 3-d surface. Its features include:

Visualization

Arbitrary 3-d views from any view position (view)

Fly-through Animations (or fly along pre-defined path) (view)

Contours at user-chosen
levels (view)

A transect tool for arbitrary cross-sections of the landscape (view)

Multiple textures alone or in combination: slope, elevation (view), planform curvature, profile curvature (view), phototone

Slope maps using arbitrary slope classes or as an unclassed map (view1 | view2)

Display at user-specified map scale

Convert slope breaks to lines for editing

Mapping

Point digitizing and editing on the 3d surface (with arbitrary text labels) (view)

Line drawing on the 3d surface in point and stream mode (view)

Line editing: move, split, join, delete, etc. (view)

Line and polygon smoothing using splines (view)

Line and polygon generalization (simplification) (view)

Polygon assembly from lines and polygon editing: split, merge, move vertexes, add/remove holes, etc. (view)

Data Handling

Import color and greyscale raster (image) files

Import and export points, lines and polygons as shapefiles

Import and export points and lines as ascii (text) files

Other

Save images as gif, jpeg or bmp files

Full documentation of features and operation in online help

The 3dMapper Control window
(click to enlarge)