An Alternate Method to Creating Height Maps

[Nicholas Bell]

This is not as difficult or time-consuming as it might appear.

First, you need a topographic map, at least 1:50,000 scale. Of course 1:24,000 or less is even better. You can find plenty on the internet. You can also purchase them in paper or digital versions. I've got a massive amount of topos available through my own collecting and because of my map making for HPS Simulations, so finding something interesting wasn't difficult for me.

Starting with a fairly extensive urban area on my Bluefields, Nicaragua map has tempered my enthusiasm for such projects, so I've decided to select a more rural area dotted with small towns easy to replicate in Visitor, with mixed open terrain and scattered forest to keep up the frame rate while playing. The interest in the Cold War, coupled with the fact that I served in the US Army in 1980's in Germany makes it "no-brainer" for me to pick out a map from central Germany.

The map:


A scan of the map area I choose to depict:


I scale the scanned image so each pixel equals one meter. This is a 5120 x 5120 map.

Zoomed in you can see the contour lines - 20 meter base with 10 meter intermediate lines.


Determine the high an low points on the map, and assign greyscale values to the contour lines to correspond. Since the elevations range from 410 to 490 meters, I use an RGP value of the elevation minus 400 to keep it simple (ie elevation 450 is assigned color value R:50 G:50 B:50). The max and min height in the PBL file define the actual in game elevations of course.

I create a separate layer for each contour which makes finding and correcting mistakes easy.


The areas enclosed in contour lines are filled with the same color.

[Nicholas Bell]

If used as is, the map would have terraced plateau elevations - they need to be smoothed. I use various methods in Paint Shop Pro and Wilbur to achieve this. Gaussian Blur is quite useful, but one must be careful not to lose the high or low points in the blur. Narrow valleys and ridges can get reduced, so some smoothing "by hand" along the slopes, but not at the bottom and top of those slopes, is required.

Also, I rescaled the image to 512 x 512 pixels to work in V3.

In Wilbur:


Eventually I did some adjustments in the narrow valleys in V3 and Bulldozer, exported the changes to a new PNG file, re-smoothed the areas and then reimported into V3. Final terrain.png looks like this:

[Nicholas Bell]

Although not related to making a height map, I'll continue the process a bit further.

Using the nifty Google Map Image Downloader I created a high-res image of the area and scaled it to match my map.


Although this image is going to require a lot of retouching to make it usable as the sat_lco file, this will be easier than creating the satellite image from scratch. Plus it makes placing objects like roads easy:

[VladAlex]

Maybe I'm not very smart but I cant understand How to do this with photoshop. It will be very interesting to explain your method step by step !

[Allie]

Eh what did he just post then ?

This is a great find on doing it mate, and i think its well described here.

Great job, keep it up,
Allie

PS; learning Photoshop is done in the photoshop forum.

[ParaGraphic L]

can I ask where you got the RGB values for the corresponding heights? I just started trying to get a height map made with Photoshop + Wilbur but I just have no idea where to find height in RGB code

[granQ]

wow, excellent work

Thanks for the tutorial..

[Baddo]

Hey, thanks!

I made some research around this very same topic maybe 4 years ago. You want to know what I found back then? I found a program which takes a contour map image and creates a heightmap out of it! It of course required manual input like setting some parameters, so it was not an automatic conversion certainly.

I found it after I had been thinking how I could best get my local area modelled into the game. I couldn't find appropriate satellite data for my area so I started looking at generating a terrain from an old-style map. And eventually I found that program, and I have a feeling that there were even more than one program which could be used to convert a contour image into a heightfield.

I stopped doing that kind of research and haven't touched the subject for a long time. I have no idea if I have that program still somewhere, or any other stuff I collected back then. ***But it should be found with search engines if someone wants to find it, I think.

Best Regards,
Baddo.

[Aplion]

Guys, Nicholas Bell is using Paintshop and not Photoshop in this tutorial.

[Rommel]

To pick a color across the whole image (just mucked around with photoshop till I found out how).

1. Eye Dropper Tool
2. Select -> Color Range -> Fuzziness = 0, and it should select everything under that RGB code, however to fill in the contours you may have to simply select the inverse and colour in yourself, simply doing the same thing as described above, start off with a bass color (perhaps %30 white or something), then apply it to a black background, with %5 opacity, then slowly do an extra "overun of white for each inner contour.

This is just temporary till I find any easier way of course. Great Tutorial and Information anyway buddy, thanks!