Export as grayscale height map?

Started by baronjutter, October 18, 2021, 06:04:04 PM

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baronjutter

Hello!  I just grabbed the demo of this in the hopes of making grayscale images to import into games to make maps.  Many games from Skylines to Workers & Resources and even Transport Tycoon all have the ability to import heightmap grayscales, the tricky part is making the actual image.  

I heard this is great software for making organic looking terrain, but I'm struggling to figure out how to export to a simple grayscale png.

WAS

There are a lot of topics discussing this over the years, you can search for here on the forums. The best method is to just apply your terrain to a height field generate, generate it, and then use it's colour output set to shade by height. Then you can stick that shader into a surface layers luminosity. You don't need GISD and other features of Terragen post processing.

Then you just setup a camera pointing down at the terrain, set to orthographic, and render.

However, with the demo, you'll not be able to do more than a 512x512 export, I believe (due to resolution constraints), and I don't believe there is orthographic camera perspective but could be wrong.

WAS

#2
Here is an example exporter project.

PS you can't export a PNG, but you can export a bitmap and convert it to PNG in Paint if you don't have conversion tools for TIFF/EXR.