Contouring and 3D mapping package has ability to create fully rendered 3D surfaces and overlay aerial photography.

Golden Software Inc. has upgraded its Surfer contouring and 3D mapping package with the ability to create fully rendered 3D surfaces and overlay aerial photography, satellite imagery and other bitmaps on these 3D surfaces. These features enable Surfer users to create photo-realistic 3D models containing both terrain and ground cover detail. Surfer 8, has more than 100 new features and enhancements.

Two powerful upgrades to Surfer 8 are advanced mosaicking functions and cross validation. Users can now instantly merge, or mosaic, multiple grid files to create a single comprehensive map with the push of a button. In addition, Surfer 8 now validates a user’s data to determine which of 12 included gridding methods will produce the best map.

Golden Software has also enhanced Surfer’s capacity with the ability to handle inputs of up to 1 billion coordinate points to generate a surface map. Viewing capabilities have also been improved with the user now able to interactively rotate and 3D tilt all maps.

Surfer 8 is fully compatible with other software. It imports and exports data files in all popular formats, and its functionality can be integrated with any ActiveX Automation-compatible software. Visual Basic, C++ and Perl scripts can be used to call Surfer to automate repetitive functions.