A while back I wrote this small program to create animated heightmaps using USGS elevation data, 3Delight, and GDAL.

Here’s a sample of the output:

Height Map Animation from jlarocco on Vimeo.

I have to admit it isn’t very useful, but I learned quite a bit about using libgdal, 3Delight’s C interface, and how to get data from the USGS website. And some of the animations look cool, so that’s also nice.

The source code has a few parameters to tweak the image quality at the cost of memory usage. The animation above was rendered on my laptop, so I had to decrease the quality a bit.