My Christmas present to myself

[lovingboth]

One hobby is landscape visualisation. Back in the early 90s, I loved playing with Vistapro, one of the first affordable programs that produced good results (reasonably) quickly. If you wanted to reproduce the 'genesis effect' sequence from Star Trek 2, you could do it...

Unfortunately, VP was never really updated past version three - it took years for version four to come out which improved a few things but left some of the other issues untouched (it was always great doing high mountains, less good with more typical UK scenery, and didn't really improve the basic rendering quality...)

Then GenesisII came along - UK authors, some excellent results.

Various things (hello JoJo) meant that it's not something I've had time to play with for a while and I was wondering what updates had been made to the program when along came this email:

** Special end-of-year software and data offer for UK and Ireland customers **

Until December 31st 2005 we are offering our new GenesisIV landscape software at 40% off the usual price.  For UK and Ireland customers purchasing the Professional or Enterprise editions we are also including our complete Britain and Ireland landscape database for free!  Educational edition purchases are eligible for any two free trial sets from our set of six for Great Britain and Ireland.

GenesisIV is the latest program in our family of Landscape Visualization and GIS software. To find out more visit http://www.geomantics.com/genesis4.htm. ; GenesisIV contains many new features making it ideal for use in both an educational and professional GIS setting.

Our free data is the same as sold on www.srtm.co.uk for £100. The data is transformed to UK Ordnance Survey National Grid format, cleaned and quality checked.  With one grid point every 100 meters it is ideal for most visualization purposes.  We have even created a free special plug-in module for GenesisIV that automatically loads data using an OS Grid Reference, and you are free to use the data in any other application (we also supply a free utility to export in Bryce and Terragen formats).

To take advantage of this offer please order using this URL.

http://www.digibuy.com/cgi-bin/product.html?91192822036

Products are priced in US Dollars, approximate UK equivalent, including 40% discount and VAT are Educational edition £20, Professional £60, Enterprise £120.

This is an emailed-only offer and not available directly from our site.

It took me about two seconds to decide to spend the money.