If you've been following my map making saga on building the town of Singling I'm currently designing the Height Map for the town. Unfortunately Nem's wasn't working too well for me because I needed an exact replica of the hills ...
So, after hours of experimenting I decided I needed to build a Height Map from scratch!!
Quote from the Ca3D-Engine website, definition of heightmap ...
A height-map is usually a square gray-scale image whose black pixels represent the lowest heights (0%) and whose fully white pixels describe the highest heights (100%). The gray values between them represent intermediate height values – the brighter a pixel, the higher is the resulting terrain at that spot.
The image is 256 gray scales. So, this means that you can have exactly 256 changes in elevation. In my case, I'm going to call each change as one meter.
I took my color map image of Singling and superimposed the contours on it. This took some time to get the scale right but it worked. Your image must be square in size ... mine was 832x832 pixels. After this, I made a new image with the same dimensions using totally white as the background. Then, I pasted this image as a new layer over my color image. From there, I painted the contours on the white layer using a slightly darker shade of gray. (My screen shot is exagerated for demo purposes.)
Once that was done, I copied and pasted the newly painted contour image as a new image, and saved it as a 64x64 BMP. I loaded up MS3D, using the heightmap tool I just loaded it up and viola!
Again, this is a quicky tutorial. As my work continues I'll show what it looks like with finer elevation changes.
Hope this helps !!!
Rob