Since I wanted to map a territory outside the US, I couldn’t rely on National Elevation Data from USGS. Instead I got a GTOPO30 file from the same server. Because of the fact that these files are very large, USGS provides them in tiles. I downloaded E020N90 tile and selected the area, which is of interest to me. For a better understanding, here is a traditional 2D map:
Below, you can see the same territory but from a GTOPO30:
As Moldova is a flat country, I decided to use the feature “Vertical Exaggeration Factor” from the “Scene” menu of Natural Scene Designer, in order to provide a better visualization of the differences in the terrain. So, I increased Vertical Exaggeration Factor from 1 to 5 and this is what I’ve got:
Finally, I decided to further improve the elevation visualization by changing the color scheme of the image. So, I imported a shaded relief overlay from the Natural Earth Data:
Historia Computabilis 