I have a 30 meter grayscale heightmap image of the entire state of Oregon (West coast of the USA), and I’m trying to make an easy way to render it without having to load the height data into a mesh at once. The displacement feature comes in very useful- I can have a small mesh that simply deforms using the image, and the placement of the image is controlled by an empty.
Because I want the mesh and camera to stay stationary I need to be able to control the displacement amplitude- so that when you’re zoomed out the terrain looks flatter, but when you ‘zoom in’ (you’re viewing a smaller part of the image) I need the mountains to scale up in height as well which requires a higher displacement value.
I didn’t see an IPO curve for displacement- am I just missing it? How can I dynamically change the displacement over time??
Also, because grayscale images are limited to 256 shades (and therefore the height is limited to 256 incriments), can I use an atlas-shaded image? (The height would depend on the HSV value of the pixel). That would let me have millions of height steps.
Another posibility would be to set displacement to max and lessen the brightness and contrast of the image itself. But again, I can’t seem to keyframe those values
If you look at the html links in the release notes, there’s a difference between scaling in obj and edit mode that may help, especially if done thru an empty that scales along one axis (altitude) only.
I’m too tired too really read what you said. (or it is the music that block all my thoughts)
But if you want heightmaps there’s is lots of resources on the net, some you can find trough terragens website hhtp://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/ .
And searching on the net should get you lots of information of topological data and convertors that can convert it into 3d data(like .obj).
Using normal maps wouldn’t be as easy and as good as downloading actual topological data…
