rick@xing.unocal.com (Richard Ottolini) (06/27/91)
Does anyone know for sure how they do the "3-D clouds" on the evening news? My speculations: They probably assume brightness is porportional to thickness. Then I don't think they are doing a sophisticated 3-D rendering based upon that info. I suggest one could vertical smear a pixel a distance based on brightness (i.e. thickness) and draw the smears from back to front (north to south on cloud images). Motivation: Satellite weather images are available on the network (keep up with sci.geo.meteorology for details). After convering from GIF to pbmplus-pgm format, they can be processed with standard or custom mult-dimensional signal analysis software. I'll probably try some experiements when I have time.