Is there a way to tell World Machine to not normalize the greyscale terrain output? I have an input file that isn’t exactly in the 0-1 range (darkest area is 20 20 20 or so), and I want to add erosion to that file. So far, so good - that works great. But when World Machine writes out the new heightmap, it uses the entire 0-1 range. Usually that’s the good, optimized thing to do, but in this case it makes it impossible for me to replace the old heightmap with the new one, because all heights are off. I need the grayscale values of the new heightmap to be mapped into the range of the old map, so that the darkest area in my new map is 20 20 20 again.
Hmm, the issue seems to be a bit more complicated than I thought. My greyscale values change even on images that are between 0 and 1. I made the simplest of networks: 8bit input going straight into an 8bit output. The input confirms that my input is between 0 and 1 in the “Altitude Scaling” section.
When I overlay both images in Photoshop, the image that World Machine output is not identical to the one I fed into it. The greyscales are off. Any idea what’s happening?
(I noticed that the forum isn’t accessible from the mainpage right now, and is supposedly offline for maintanance. I hope these posts aren’t shouting into the void… :))
One last update on the issue: this even happens when I interpret the source heightmap as an RGB image. Easy to reproduce:
[ul][li]Create a File Input node[/li]
[li]Reference an 8bit greyscale image (I used a complex 2k terrain, not sure about very simple test images).[/li]
[li]Check the “Interpret as RGB” box[/li]
[li]Connect to a Bitmap Output node[/li]
[li]Compare source and destination image. The destination will be darker.[/li][/ul]