Building Mars Terrain

I've been trying to build Martian terrain using TerraGear and could you a little advice.
Please excuse my nubeness....


Here is what I've done so far.

Downloaded and built FlightGear, TerraGear, etc.   I'm running 
    cygwin on WinXP.  It wasn't 'straight out of the box', but
    I used the mailing archive to fix the problems that others
    had already discovered.

Applied the changes suggested by
http://seneca.me.umn.edu/pipermail/flightgear-devel/2002-March/005377.html


Downloaded a MOLA (Mars Laser Altimeter) MEGT file.  These files with
  elevations at  1/128 degree intervals.  The heights are specified like
  and altitude.

Using 3Dem (http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html) I converted these
  to USGS Ascii DEM files.

Used DemChop to split these into directories that TerraGear wants for DEM-30.
   I had to modify DemChop to handle a larger Dem file (3840 records).
   
Ran TerraFit.py on the whole mess.


I tried to create an "everywhere" land mass by using tguserdef.  I defined
   a big polygon w/ default texture and ran this over a 10 deg by 10 deg
   section.

========= start of file =========
<?xml version="1.0"?>

<PropertyList>

  <polygon>
    <name> Mars Ground</name>
    <material>Default</material>
    <contour>
     <hole>false</hole>
     <v>
      -179.99 -89.99
      -179.99 89.99
      179.99 89.99
      179.99 -89.99
     </v>
    </contour>
  </polygon>
</PropertyList>
========= end of file =========

I ran fgfs-tools-*  on DEM-30 LandMass and it generated a scenery directory.
When I use this w/ FlightGear w/ debug on I see 

  Skipping bad material entry params
  Tile not found (Ok if initializing)
  Tile not found (Ok if initializing)
  Failed to remove nav-vor-ident sound
  Failed to remove nav-vor-ident sound
  Failed to remove nav-vor-ident sound
  Failed to remove nav-vor-ident sound
  FaiFailed to remove nav-vor-ident sound


Depending on the lat/lon I select, it might freeze on loading.  When it doesn't, the
    terrain doesn't look so hot.  There are steep canyons where there shouldn't be.
    Also, I'm running w/ no clouds or sky effects and everything looks pretty shadowy.

If I look at the files using FGSD I can see bad discontinuities along square grids.  
    Also, if I load the whole 10 deg directory (w180s10) it looks like some of the
    files are blank.   See the web page for images...
http://members.interfold.com/pcazzola/mars/
  Click on thumbnails for higher resolution images.


My questions:

Any idea which part of the process is introducing these problems?
I believe I ran TerraFit w/ the default error (40m?).  Is this too large?
What are those error messages above trying to tell me?


Thanks,
Phil Cazzola

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