Running Surveyor

Overview

• Setting Up Your Environment describes how to set up your account to run Surveyor.
• Starting Surveyor describes how to launch surveyor from the unix shell prompt, and what command line arguments you can give.
• Notes on the User Interface gives some general information on how to use various aspects of the Surveyor user interface.
• Setting Up Your World describes how to define a terrain data set for Surveyor to use. This section should be read by first-time users.

For illustration purposes, let us say that you have Surveyor installed in the directory /usr/local/surveyor. Then if you are on a Sun system, you would add the following lines to your .cshrc:

setenv SURVHOME /usr/local/surveyor
set path=($path $SURVHOME/bin/sun4)

setenv SURVHOME /usr/local/surveyor
set path=($path $SURVHOME/bin/sgi)

Starting Surveyor

surveyor [saved-file] [saved-file] [save-file ...]

Notes on the User Interface

• Dimmed Buttons.

  Button interface items may appear to be dimmed, or grayed out, because Surveyor is busy performing a task, or because the function does not make sense at the present time. For example, when you first bring up the Postcards window, most of the buttons will be dimmed because you have no postcards to view.

• Ellipses (...).

  Ellipses at the end of a menu item or button name indicate that selecting that function does not immediately perform a task, but rather will present you with a dialog first. Thus, when experimenting with buttons and menu items in Surveyor, ellipses signal to you that nothing will happen immediately and it is thus safe to select that item.

• Cycle buttons.

  

  The above figure illustrates a cycle button. It is distinguished by the two rotating arrows on the left side of the box. A cycle button indicates that you may select between a number of preset options. In this case, the option ``HDTV'' has been selected. A single click with the left mouse button will cycle you to the next choice in the list.

  Alternatively, you may use the right-most mouse button to make the cycle button behave like a pop-up menu, allowing you to see all the choices at once and select the one you desire directly. The figure below shows the pop-up menu being selected for this cycle button while the right-most mouse button is being held down.

  

1. In the Surveyor main window, select "File->New Surface." You will be presented with the Edit Surface dialog.
2. In the upper left hand corner, select "Elevation->AddElevation" to put an elevation (topographic) dataset on your surface. You will be prompted to select an elevation data set. The data set must be in VICAR format, but can be any pixel size.
3. Once you have selected an elevation data set, you will be presented with the "Edit Simple Elevation" dialog. You will need to fill in the if your are unclear on what a pyramid is, or need to review how to make one. If you leave "Levels" set to the default of 1, your images will take much longer to render and will require much more memory. Also, if you are making an animation the animation will "sparkle" because of extra aliasing. Once you have entered the number of levels in the pyramid, select the "Done" button.
4. Next, you need to assign an image to the elevation. The image must be in VICAR format, and the same size as the elevation dataset. Also, it must have the same number of levels in its pyramid. If you have gray-scale (unsigned byte) image data, you need to select the single file with the "Image->Add Gray" menu. If you have color, you will need to select three separate image files (red, green, blu) using the "Image->Add Color" menu.
5. Click "OK" to dismiss the "Edit Plane" dialog.
6. In the "File" menu, select "Save->World" to write out a world file. Next time you enter surveyor, you can specify this file on the command line or use "Load->World" to work with the same data.