An Alternate Method to Creating Height Maps

[Allie]

Heightmap is in greyscale, so BLACK is lowest point and WHITE is highest point.

So its a gradient from BLACK to WHITE !!

Photoshop, Paintshop, Coffeeshop........ whats the difference

Later,
Allie

[ParaGraphic L]

thanks man. So when I set minimal height at -100 and max height at 100 the scale is black= -100 50%Gray= 0 and white= 100 right?

[Opteryx]

Yep.

[Nicholas Bell]

I don't have Photoshop, but as Allie points out they all work the same.

The essence of the process is:

1. Scan and scale topo map to correct size for use in V3 in accordance with the parameters and island size you are using.
2. Convert scan to greyscale.
3. Create raster layers on top of topo map image which should be your background layer. Each of the new raster layers should correspond to a contour elevation (main or intermediate - you can also create your own intermediate contours by interpolation to help better define elevations)
4. Assign each layer an RGB value to correspond to the contour elevation. Darker is lower in elevation. RBG value ranges from 0,0,0 (black) to 255,255,255 (white). It is not necessary to use 255,255,255 as the layer equalling the highest elevation, as V3 will take the max & min elevation from the PBL file. If you export the terrain.png from V3 you will see that V3 has changed the heightmap so that the highest point is 255,255,255. But you don't have to work that out yourself.

Instead I just make the RGB value easy to determine based on the range of elevations on the map.

For example:
Elevation RGB
450 45,45,45
440 44,44,44
430 43,43,43
420 42,42,42

You can use any scheme as long as the interval between elevations has an equal interval between the RGB values.

5. Use the pencil (or a brush set to 100% hardness) to prevent anti-aliasing when you trance the contour lines. You want solid color.
6. In each layer, use flood fill (or paint bucket) to fill the elevation within the contours lines with the same RGB value as the contour line. Understand that contour lines will either be enclosed shapes or will run off the map. I guess you need to understand how to read a topographic map. If you don't, this process probably has you pretty confused. Google topographic map and you will get plenty of help.



Hope this helps get you started a little better.