Using Silhouettes as Terrains |
| Here's a tip for converting a silhouette, like the one below, into a height map, for use as a terrain. |
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| In addition to Bryce, all we need is a painting program that can do a directional blur (or motion blur). To create a mountain that looks like the silhouette above, we'd like to replace each column of pixels with the mean pixel value in the corresponding column; in other words, we need to blur this image in the vertical direction only. In Photoshop or your favorite image editing application, blur vertically with the maximum accepted distance. The result will look like this: |
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| If we rendered this, we'd have an extruded version of the profile. We might want to expand the tonal range (in Photoshop, with the levels dialog). It also may be helpful to start with a square image having the same resolution we intend to use for our terrain, say 256 pixels square or an image one pixel high by 256 pixels wide. To make more realistic mountains, we can simply darken the edges, using an airbrush tool. Here's the finished result. |
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