Need help working with a heightmap

Bug Reports
#1

Hello, I got the software last week and I’ve been trying to create a mountain range based on this heightmap from a game:

[Album] Imgur

It’s very large.

I have these problems:

  • I’m a total newbie in this program. I’ve read the documentation and tried to search for tutorials that supply my needs, but nothing.
  • Every tutorial I have stumbled upon creates a mountain from procedurally generated terrain, not from a heightmap.
  • When I import the heightmap, WM makes it look really flat.

The mountain range I’m trying to work on is at the bottom right of the image. I’m very lost. Thank you in advance.

#2

That image you linked is not a heightmap. It’s an rgb colormap.

#3

The greyscale portion of the image (the landmass) looks like a pretty usable heightmap to me.

To get rid of the blue areas, I would use a FileInput node in bitmap mode followed by a ChannelSplitter to select either the red or green channel, and use the resulting channel as the heightmap. Set an appropriate altitude range on your project to avoid “flat” in the 3D viewport. To make it look a bit more like terrain, or at least a map, add a Colorize node. To make it more realistic, you will probably want to insert a fine-grain (aka high-frequency, low amplitude) AddNoise or PerlinNoise node before the colorizing, and then you can start applying tutorial lessons about Erosion and so forth.

#4

The image you linked, apart from being a color map, has very deep looking channels all along the island, if this was generated by software turn them off (probably it’s some kind of river feature).

As others said, try turning the image into Grayscale in Photoshop

EDIT: looks like a Dwarf Fortress map, if the software you used has a feature to export without rivers use that, if not you can use a blur device in World Machine, or if that makes you loose too much detail maybe try the Snow device

#5

tadulasiq@pop3.namnerbca.com

#6