michiel | 8 years ago | 5 comments | 7 likes | 6.6K views
LostBoyz, vincent, Ulli and 4 others like this!
Here's a great site I just discovered.
It's an online tool that generates displacementmaps of any part of the world.
I just did a quick test, exporting a loch in Scotland and I think it's very promising. Real-world maps look so much better than artificially generated maps!
The site generates the displacementmaps as 16 bits PNG files, which is good. However some terracing is visible so I think the data still is 8 bits. Maybe blurring the picture in Photoshop can help.
The site does not offer colourmaps, so we will have to find a way to colour the terrain. But let's not be too picky about a free online tool.
For the above BluffTitler render I used a picture layer with the Displacementmap effect. The fog has been created with the Camera\CameraFog effect and the water with the mirror layer.
Hopefully the landscape, water and skybox layers we're working on as well as the vegetation effect will help to make it look less like plastic.
Very inspiring stuff. Thank you terrain.party!
terrain.party
I have made this with the same site in Bluftitler.
The colormap is from the same site without the Raster Square. It only needs to scale to the same (overlay) size in Paint program.
The water is a flat image that I cloned from the original, and the sky is a sphered skybox image.
Great find Michiel!
komies, 8 years ago
Here I have put the heightmap in World-Machine and blended the colormaps from the site and the WM generated one.
With some more time and effort you can make beautiful landscapes.
komies, 8 years ago
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About michiel
Michiel den Outer is the founder and lead coder of Outerspace Software. He lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
If he isn't busy improving BluffTitler, he is playing the piano or rides the Dutch dikes on his bikes.
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