Making Landscape Textures

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi all,

Can anyone give me any tips on the best way to make a texture to apply to a landscape mesh? I would like to have a texture for example which was white for snow at high levels, green in the middle, and brown at low levels. As I see it there may be 2 ways of doing this.

  1. If the landscape were generated from a greyscale height map then perhaps a tool could be used which would convert this to a colour image of the type mentioned above. If it did not come from a height map, is it possible to generate one from the mesh? Probably not… Anyway, does anyone know of such a tool? If not i could write one quite easily.

2)A better solution might be to have a python script which would generate the texture for the mesh. This would have the advantage that the mesh could be changed and the script simply re-run to update the texture. However, I have no idea if this is possible through blender/python. Anyone know of such a script?

Are there easier ways of making the textures i haven’t thought of? I’ve found plenty of tutorials on making the landscape mesh, but they all just say ‘Apply a landscape texture’, without telling you how to make one!

Thanks in advance,

David

2

Well i’ve found some programs which generate textures from heightmaps, but nothing on doing it from within blender. So any thoughts on generating the heightmap from the mesh?

3

You can use blender world forge by Stefano:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8095&start=0
terrain_t plugin:
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/plugins/texture.html
or Terragen. you can search for it. Use Ter2blend to import into blender. Search for tuts by Ripsting and others I can’t remember right now.
You can also use a paint program to generate your own texture and UV map it onto your landscape.
Or see this:
http://www.flipcode.com/tutorials/tut_proctext.shtml

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4

you could use a blend texture as a stencil of a colourband, with the “XYZ” buttons set to"Z–"

To get a heightmap, put an Ortho camera above the scene, and render it with the ZBuf plugin