Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Terrain Displacement

This is still not enough detail for what we are going for, but it's required to get the scale proper. Next you want to create two locators and snap them to the lower left and lower right corners of the polygon displacement. Then using the measure tool (Create > Measure Tools > Distance Tool) you want to measure the distance between these two locators. The resulting value is 479.26 units. Back in the rangeStatistics we noted that the total width of our range is 48,378.5 Meters and the Max elevation is 4393 Meters. Well, the "Alpha Gain" that we set to 10 before means that our displacement is currently 10 units high. Therefore we can calculate out how much we need to set this alpha gain to get a true scale for our scene.

The formula is:

scene distance / desired distance = alpha gain / max elevation

Thus:

479.26 / 48,378.5 = X / 4393
X = 43.5

We now need to increase our Alpha Gain for the displacement file node to 43.5. Since our original "Displacement to Polygon" conversion was done with Alpha Gain set to 10, we need to delete that poly surface and run the conversion again. This polygonal surface will never be rendered, but it is needed to have something physical in the scene to align our camera to. You will also note that if you used the original numbers of 5 for Number U and V in the tessellation settings, your poly count for the surface is roughly 1.1 million polygons. A far cry from the 31250 that Maya estimated. But even with the high poly count, Maya still has decent performance when tumbling your camera into position.

Now it's just a matter of selecting a nice view poit for your camera and firing off a final render.

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