Hi
I’m trying to use blender for heightmaps i can get it done by taking a picture saving to png then later converting that to raw but blender has a raw file output what steps do u need to take to use that anyone ever export in raw format what steps did u take to get it to work?
i do this all the time
for heightmaps in simple cylindrical format
bake the displacemant map and save as a 32 bit exr image
now blender will save this gray image as a 3 layer 32 bit RGB or 4 layer RGBA
i can get it done by taking a picture saving to png
that will not work well
you have to bake a displacement map
an example would be this reduced size( and 8 bit copy) heightmap for Kepler 452 / b
for that i used
ANT in spherical output subdevided 2880 times - BIG MESH
then added a second uv mesh ( 360x180 subdevided)
and baked the first mesh to the second that was uvmapped to “spherical”
then cleaned up the heightmap
or
are you thinking of just a small area like in this below
If you need something in .raw you can convert it to that with ImageJ I’ll use blender to generate the height map with a procedural, Save it as a .tif (png compresses, bad bad png) And If you can bake your map at a higher resolution and scale it down in imageJ
Here is one I converted over for unity
(png compresses, bad bad png)
NOT right
png uses LOSSLESS !!! compression
jpg uses LOUSY !!! compression
jpg tosses out information . png uses ZIP to compress the image .
as for the RAW
any of the many many tools can do that
imagemagick or Gmic or DevIL ,or any of the other tools
PS
if you compress a tiff it uses JPG lousy compression
this is built into the tiff format
Hey John looking more to o small area I did not understand most of what you wrote lol i will have to try it step by step
bake the displacemant map and save as a 32 bit exr image
how do i bake a displacement map?is there a tutorial i can foolow on what u wrote?
but you don’t use the raw ouput then?
I already use that imagej tool took me a while to find it. Tiff i don’t like
Been using a website called terrain party to try some height maps awesome site and can get 16 bit png images of anywhere on the planet.
Still would like to be able to export diet using the RAW output can’t figure out how to do it so it actually works.
a displacement or a normal map or even a pre-rendered texture have the same process for baking a uv mapped image
like this vid for baking a Normal
or
just click displacement instead of normal ( tangent normal)
then in the UV editor save a copy as a 32 bit float exr ( 16 bit will not do the values will likely be between 0 and 1 or 0 to 2 )
as to saving a rendered image
click “image” then “save as”
there is a TGA-raw ( *.tga ) format but *.tiff handles 16 bit UNSIGNED and 32 bit float
open-exr is a 32 bit float format
cineon is a 128 bit movie image format ( cinepaint uses this)
i use the exr format
gmic,nip2/vips, cinepaint
( have not used imagemagick on exr images but i do use a custom built Q32 version of imagemagick )
all of these can use a exr image and in the case of gmic convert to a *.raw from the terminal
gmic input_Image.exr -o output.raw
Thx John will test it out