South Tian Shan Mountains

South Tian Shan Photo Comparisons.

See also the Animations Page.

These pictures are all rollovers which show the CG composite, and with the mouse over you get the original photo. The renderings were done with World Construction Set 6. The terrain is derived from 90 meter DEM's which have been overlaid with Landsat photos. These photos have an on the ground resolution of about 14 meters so foregrounds have been broken up a bit with WCS bumpmaps. The only way I could get these bumps to show through the overlay was to make a bumpy ecosystem and use the "tint foliage" option on the colour map. This is set to fade out with distance from the camera. Matching the camera positions with the rendering points is only approximate but the focal lengths are correct as I used a digital camera that recorded this information.

90 meter Dem's are notorious for having large holes in mountainous areas, which is a blow as these are the areas I am interested in. The holes can be patched with 900m DEM's but this results in a very inaccurate smoothing out of the terrain as you can see on the K2 stuff. (I will be updating this later) . The solution to this is to use Jonathan de Ferranti's DEM's. He has painstakingly patched the holes in all the worlds areas over 7000m and they look just like the real thing as you can see from the pictures below. Visit his site for a full account of his work and to download the data at www.viewfinderpanoramas.org

If you want a look at the unpatched data have a look at Google earth!

This picture is looking at Khan Tengri (6995m). It was taken late in the day and I matched the lighting on the rendering, note the lighting on the ridge to the left foreground of the peak.

Here we are looking south to Peak Pobedy (7439m). The amount of snow cover is different in the photo with the main face being clear in the rendering.. The main formation however, looks very similar to reality.

All these pictures were taken in the vicinity of our main camp. This was looking west down and North across the Inylchek Glacier. I don't know what peak this is and the rendering seems to be from a viewpoint a little too high. The formation of the two peaks and the other one peeking over the left hand ridge seem quite accurate.

This is looking straight down the Glacier facing west. It is not a very good match as again the render point is a little high. (next time I will take a GPS). The peak in the above picture can be seen to the right and the ridges on the left show well.