Hello to all!
First things first! I had tried blender in the past and followed some tutorials. although I never got very far, I learned the concept o the b/w height maps and terrain creation from them.
Now, when I was little I fell in love with an old video game known as Midwinter, one of the first 1st person video games. You were supposed to roam around a fictional island complete with mountains, hills and valleys in primitive 3d polygons. The most realistic rendering of the game world is a zoomable topographical/geophysical/relief in-game map.
As a tribute to my childhood obsession I decided to use this map and make a 3d model of the Midwinter island, or at least die trying. For now I took screenshots of the map interface and made a collage from those screenshots, forming a big map.
My biggest problem is that I don’t know whether Blender can read the coloring of a geo map or whether there is a software that can convert a topo map to a heightmap. Geo maps seem to use a color range of blue-green-yellow-orange-dark brown, I am not aware of any easy way that would interpret dark brown (mountain peaks) as white and blue (sea level) as black.
So what would you when you ahd to make a 3d landscape with only a geo map as a source?
Secondary question: the game also provides a “relief” option, which shows a b/w image of the island with a very rough surface. It doesn’t seem to indicate elevation, like the geo map, but rather the relative roughness of the terrain in each elevation. As I am not a topographer I am not sure what to make of this data, or how I could use it in a 3d software. Perhaps as a bump map. I will try and provide screenshots asap.