[gdal-dev] gdal2tiles.py alternative

[Homme Zwaagstra]

Hi,

This might be of interest to users of gdal2tiles.py:
<https://github.com/geo-data/cesium-terrain-builder#ctb-tile>. Although
originally designed to create terrain tiles for the Cesium Javascript 
engine, it
can also create tiles in any GDAL write enabled file based format e.g:

ctb-tile --output-format GTiff --profile mercator --output-dir ./tiles 
./input-data.vrt

Apart from the case where you need tiles in formats other than PNG or 
JPEG, it
might also be useful if you need more performance: the application is
multithreaded and a quick benchmark suggests that on a 1 core machine 
you get a
3x speed increase and on a 4 core machine it is a 4x speed increase 
(disk i/o
starts to be more limiting, it seems).

The tool also performs warping if the input data source is not in the output
grid projection.

If you have docker on your system then an easy way to get to a command 
prompt
with `ctb-tile` available is to run:

docker run -t -i homme/cesium-terrain-builder:0.3.0 bash

Note you don't get the fancy KML or webviewer output that you do with
gdal2tiles!

The software heavily leverages GDAL, so thank you.

Homme