Well here it is, anyone can dowload in Sketchfab or here, no annoying PM
https://mega.nz/#!6F8jRDjI!McHcRboueCF6n41fVEkzG54z9-NIhOolNUa_X-dMVt8
@Lainz: Brilliant! And a very generous gift for everyone too, thank you Lainz.
I’ve got it running in lainzmixer demo. As you say it is very slow: 1 step/second on this PC (GeForce GT610) & 1 step/ 7 seconds on the laptop (Intel HD Graphics).
At first I assumed ‘earth displace.png’ was only for Blender because its not in the mtl file & is so much larger than ‘earth.png’, i.e. 21600x10800 & 8192x4096 respectively. I did try smaller displacement maps & a completely black one to see if that affected the speed but they were all much the same.
…it has the .blend model that you can tune and set a different amount of subdivisions with the subsurf modifier.
Is that the subdivisions of the wire-frame sphere? Ok, I’ve now got Blender installed but when I opened the ‘earth.blend’ file the subsurf modifier shows 2 options: View is set to 3 & Render is 5. View does not accept 0 so I set Render to 0 & it rendered ok but the exported obj file was bigger than the original & ran at the same slow speed. I’ll have to learn Blender some more & maybe try a flat surface with ambient lighting. Blender & Sketchfab look very impressive & good resources for game/graphics programmer– so thanks for those pointers too Lainz (&Eugene) – best regards, RWC.
@Phil: WOW! All you guys are just so awesome I can’t keep up. Now I’m spoilt for choice. I’m looking forward to trying the QGIS with OpenLayers and QuickMapServices plugins & especially the P4G GIS controls in Lazarus. Thanks again Phil, great links & information.
And thanks to avra & Graeme for those links too.
@PaulFMichell: ‘Grid InQuest II’ is fantastic & very professional (& Free Pascal!). I was considering adding a GB OS option for the UK plotting so now I can do Ireland too. I’m looking forward to trying the text file conversion & digging into your math code if you don’t mind? A very good & flexible application. Thanks a lot for your input too Paul & best regard.
BTW I need to take my boy for a short holiday before school starts again so I’ll have to wait a few days to try out all these new options & get back to you all later.
p.s. My boy (now 15) is giving all his soft toy animals to charity but I’m keeping the baby Leopard?? (might make a good splash screen for ‘Built with Lazarus & Free Pascal’ or is that a Cheetah?).