Hi all, just curious if anyone has recommendations for using Blender and maybe add-ons to make height map from a shaded photo, so I can take a picture of a relief carving and reproduce it for 3D printing…
I think a dedicated photo editor is better for this, (Gimp/Photoshop). Height maps need to be at least 16 bit greyscale (better 32). 8 bit images will have visible banding when used as a height map.
So unless you have a 16/32 bit image you will need to use a photo editor to convert the image to a high bit depth, upscale it, blur it a little and then downscale again (to get more info in the gradients) and save at high bit depth.
The other thing to watch out for are shadows in the image as they can cause unwanted depth variation, not all images will make a decent height map for displacement.
For 3d printing you will have to displace the geometry and apply the displacement.
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You can use Materializer or Shadermap-4. They will accept an image file, and convert it to either a Normal Map or a Height Map, which can be saved… Shader Map 4 is a bit more complex than Materializer…
several online …
It is better to convert to at least a 16-bit PNG before running through them. Stay away from JPG images…
Thank you, I’ll check it out…
about the only way is to use a " shape form shade" program
there are not that many that really work
i use a rather OLD bit of code called " mini_sfs"
it builds using gcc33
here is an example
I think I figured it out, but thank you for making the effort! I wouldn’t know how to use that snippet anyway.