Terrain difference for Displacement maps

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I modeled a rough landscape in my 3D tool (Cinema4D) and brought the height map to World Machine.
There I used some erosinal effects and stuff. As last step I wanted to generate the difference between original and eroded terrain to generate a displacement map that I could use on my rough terrain in Cinema.

No problem I thought first, but I fast noticed that you can´t generate negative values.

Does someone know if there´s a way to do this? This would be a great feature I think (for game engines the output of normal maps could be interesting, but that´s just a guess)

And of course I´d like a 16Bit tiff output ;-).

best,
Walli

2

Think a bit more! You already got the toughest part! :slight_smile:

Cinema4D can probably also subtract values! If not just turn the terrain upside-down (scale -1 in up-direction) for this…

Do you get what I’m trying to say? :wink:

In WM, you can do two differences. One for adding, and the other for subtracting!

You may or may not need a scaling factor in C4D to get the proportions right, but that should do it.

3

another solution is to bias your maps so that the zero-point is moved to 0.5, making everything between 0 and 0.5 correspond to negative values.

Basically remap -1…0…1 to 0…0.5…1. To do this, use two clamp devices and clamp the new terrain to the upper half of the height range (0.5…1.0) and clamp the old to the lower (0…0.5), and then subtract the lower from the upper.

Then when you import the displacement map into cinema, scale it back accordingly.

4

thanks for those hints, I for sure will try them out!

best,
Walli