Non-grayscale heightmaps in Blender?

Has anyone ever tried generating terrain in Blender from a non-grayscale heightmap? I’m thinking of the format exported by MicroDEM, which uses shades of blue for the terrain and red for ocean level. Example shot attached as 8 bit .png to save bandwidth. For actual use in the application I have in mind, the format would be either .tga or .bmp.

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You can use two displacement modifiers, and filter out the channels in texture settings by changing the RGB Multiply values.

So basically, can’t use it as is, but would have to frig around with it to convert it to grayscale? Ok. :slight_smile:

Incidentally, when I saved the original .tga as png-8 it turned out there were only 53 colours in the example in the OP. I had expected more.

Upload a TGA so I can play? But using displace and the like to generate landscapes is something easy enough to do in blender, And as for separating a red and blue channel we do have nodes for just that occasion.

One .tga coming up. And it sounds like I’ll have to read up on nodes. Haven’t got that far yet.

Attachments

705x833.zip (417 KB)