topographical-lines

Drawing a Topographical Map

I've been working on a visualization project for 2-dimensional continuous data. It's the kind of thing you could use to study elevation data or temperature patterns on a 2D map. At its core, it's really a way of flattening 3-dimensions into two-dimensions-plus-color. In my particular field of study, I'm not actually working with geograph...

How to make topographic map from sparse sampling data?

I need to make a topographic map of a terrain for which I have only fairly sparse samples of (x, y, altitude) data. Obviously I can't make a completely accurate map, but I would like one that is in some sense "smooth". I need to quantify "smoothness" (probably the reciprocal the average of the square of the surface curvature) and I wan...