no gray scale height map import options for FT? WTF?!

Ed_War

All I can say is OH MY GOSH!!!! FOR REAL?!?!
I bought this 2 years ago at the Indianapolis GenCon and the guys there told me I could use it to make maps with my existing height maps. It took me a while to get around to where I needed to use it for that and now that I've arrived at that point I'm starting to regret my purchase.

Honestly, this was highly disappointing since FT has so many other and fuller features. This should have at least been in an update or something. One of THE FIRST things that should have gone into FT of any version (arguably any mapping software) is the ability to import height maps from at least .JPG and .BMP.

Does anyone know how to do this and have it work right? I've at least got PS if it needs to be in a different format. As long as I have instructions I'm willing to jump through a few hoops however I refuse to edit code and/or write a bunch of stuff down to tranpose to something else as that is what this editor is supposed to be for.

mfrizzell

What is a height map? I've never heard the term before.

Ed_War

A gray-scale or color-scale digital picture, usually something like a .jpg, .bmp, .png (or maybe a .psd if you're using PS but format really doesn't matter all that much) in which the color of each individual pixel represents a certain height on a 3D map terrain. There is one at the beginning of this video.

jslayton

FT can load binary data files such as DEM or BIN, but image files seem to have slipped through.

http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/ThereandBackAgain/index.html uses a tool called Wilbur to make files that FT should be able to read. If you load your height field into Wilbur as a "Grayscale Image Surface" instead of the first three steps, then the rest of the tutorial should get your heightfield into FT. You probably will have to use Surface>>Map Info in Wilbur to set the edges of your height field before saving the MDR file, though.

Ralf did something similar with his Jhendor maps some time back ( http://www.jhendor.de/tutorials/cc2-ft.pdf starting at step 6), with the exception that he was only needing an 8-bit surface to get what he wanted. Wilbur can also read 16-bit PNG files (and 32-bit binary rasters), which allows for somewhat greater vertical precision. The MDR file format stores height samples as 32-bit floating-point samples, meaning that the everything in Wilbur will come over to FT.

Ed_War

Thanks jslayton, this is exactly what I was looking for. Sounds like you've done this a couple of times and you nailed it as far as answers go! I'll see what PS can do first, then I'll see about Wilbur.