A new version of Blender has been released in the time since the last post. Looks like it has some new nifty features and more upgrades to the UI. I really must try that again.
So in the last post I had some blobby landscape in greyscale format and it needs some mountains. I dragged out a mountain tile I got from the Shuttle Lidar data - do a search for "SRTM 30m download" - and you can grab bits of the earth. This one is from somewhere around Pakistan or similar in the Himalayas. I have flattened it to remove the low frequency height leaving just the mountain detail. The greyscale of that is provided here in case anybody wants to use it.
GreyscaleMountains2048.png Mountains3D.png
Taking the blobby height greyscale I just used a paint package curve tool to select where I want the mountains placed. Then I can use my 3D tools to multiply the mountain by the greyscale selection. After that I can add those masked mountains back onto the original blobby height map to give something similar but with extra sharp mountains in the selected areas.
MountainMask1.png MountainMask2.png
After having done that I created a general noise greyscale and added a bit of that into the mix too all over. Its all been offset and scaled so that 0 is sea level and the mountains are about 2000m high and the noise is something like 50m high.
LandAndSea1.png
As part of that image I also took the original black and white map of the area and where it was sea, dropped the height by 50m. In that way it makes the coastline match up that little bit better with the original.
After that, just as a test, I clamped the height map so that there is no negative values and used some basic texturing based on the height to make a colour map image to paste on the top of the height. I'll show that in a new post so that the WIP grabber doesn't get the wrong one like it did last time...
The landscape is still a bit blobby for my liking but it will have to do. I will run some erosion passes on it and see if I can generate some rivers and get a little detail into those cliffs. As a side effect of running erosion it will spit out the water height map which includes rivers, and also makes a stab at guessing the vegetation and temperature of it all so we can then add more textures based on those values too.
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