This Means Something

Yeah. I know what it means...it means I have WAY too much time on my hands.

Well, it is a holiday week and the phones are pretty quiet. Also I took two PSE's (Partner Service Exams) yesterday and my brain is feeling a little mushy.

So, I thought I'd share with you my Devil's Tower, WY surface, rendered with...you guessed it...mashed potatoes.



First I found Devil's Tower in Google Earth. I zoomed in nice and close - Google "Eye Altitude" of 7000'. Then, in Civil 3D I set my coordinate system to Wyoming Eastern State Plane WY83-EF, because hey- if you're gunna F-around you might as well do so accurately as possible.

So then I use the schnifty import Google Earth Image and Surface... command.

I was a little disappointed with the DEM resolution of the tower itself.


Armed with some factoids, photos and memory of having been there twice I "guesterpolated" (copywright 2007, Louisa Holland) the rest.

I sketched in some additional contours and added them to the surface.

Now my last step was to whip up a render material. Get it? Whip up?




I found a photo of mashed potatoes through Google images and used it to create a render material. Because the tower is so large and the potato image was so small I had to increase the size of my mashed potatoes by 500x.

Then in the Surface properties, I applied the render material to my tower.

When I get time, I might take this into Viz to make the potatoes more fluffy. Until then this is all I got.