Dear forum,
I’d like to hear your opinion on the chances of transforming a 2D map into a 3D map with little effort. It is a quite big map with 7150 x 11000 px (see attachment) and I do not see myself working on it with the sculpting tool.
I was hoping someone knows a way to use the colors as input for a displacement modifier or something like that. If you have an idea then please let me know how to do it.
Thanks in advance!
Michael
There’s not really a way to do this in this case, because your color data isn’t topographical but is climate/terrain based. You need topographical/elevation data to transform a 2D image to a 3D image; if you can find a topographical map of this place, it’s quite easy to do, but as it stands, your data is unfortunately meaningless on the third axis
Well… usually a heightmap is colored by a colorramp (biome map) and of course you could re-map this to a height map… but this kind of rendering/ painting for let’s say the mountains wiht explicit shadows … doesn’t really work…(of course you need something without text…)…
You may filter the blue for sea, light blue for coast and also using this for some neighour info (context) for the land itsself… also the orange part as sandy… Then the light green to darker green… Her for example not using black (shadow) but fill this up with the context color… then also the “highlands” just have some general wavy texture… ohh and i forgot the bluish ice…
So in short:
I tried using the jpg as a height map by separating and combining the rgb channels, but… it’s not great.
But it shouldn’t be too much work to just recolor a blurred map in some image editor and combine it with the original later on for some details.
I also found an older thread in a german DSA forum where some people were discussing this topic (without a proper solution as always, but maybe that could be a place to ask as well)
https://dsaforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=42164
If it’s a real terrain, you can get the data from Google Maps.
Try doing the separation in 2D - Gimp etc…
Add some blur so all those tiger stripe colors become single colors. You should get a better result with simpler patterns.
I wonder if the other commenters have found Fan Project land on a map of earth? 
You could try a tool mentioned here:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/119018/is-there-a-filter-to-reverse-emboss
Thanks, but unfortunately it is no real terrain. It is the land of a role playing game.
Thanks! I came across this thread as well and as you said: no solution. There is a also a video on YT, where a guy uses the sculpture tool to hand-model the entire map. I was hoping for a more convenient approach with the help of a clever workflow.
Sorry, you’re out of luck. As I commented- non-topographical data can’t be implicitly converted to topographical data. There’s no existing algorithm for this
Will look into it. Thanks!
You can use ShaderMap-4 to create a Displacement Map as well as Normals from the image, you will need to change out some colors as the sand is light and needs to be dark for it to drop down, Dark=Low Light =High… and it has enough controls to do a nice job…
Looks promising. Thanks for the lead.
Yes, looks good! Thanks!
