There is a fantastic set of tutorials I’ve been fiddling around with for the last week or two, available at http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php

Last night I started more intensive testing and so far I’ve managed to shoehorn some Mars content into the tutorial program. This week we begin work on the first rudimentary ColonyKit and GUI.

Above is a 720×360 heightmap and jpg texture of Mars, with exagerated elevations. Olympus Mons is on the lower right, her sister volcanoes nearby and Valles Marineris in the center. I don’t think the texture and heightmap are perfectly aligned or even rotated on the same orentation, but as a proof-of-concept it’s exciting to see the results of a few hours of research and tinkering.

I’ve been investigating some of the tools available through the Virtual Terrain Project and they have a lot of valuable tutorials and information. Here’s 15 minutes with one of their utilities, it’s the Tharis region of Mars using a 4096×2048 TIFF of global elevation data. I had to do an eyeball scaling of the elevations, but it’s close enough as a proof-of-concept: