Earthworks 30m detailed elevation

[cyphyr]

Ok gang I think I'm shooting myself in the foot again but here goes. I need to place some detailed earthworks (between 10m and 30m diameter) within my landscape. I can make them huge in Photoshop using a greyscale image as a displacement (1024x1024) but given that TG uses 1 pixel to equal 1 meter when I downsize the photoshop image to the required size (30x30 or 10x10) I automatically get "stepping". Is there a way around this?
Thanks
Richard

[rcallicotte]

Is it one pixel per meter?  I thought the ratio was the same as Maya.

[JimB]

Can you post a pic, it's hard to figure out what you mean by 'stepping'? Is the heightmap 8-bit or 16-bit?

[cyphyr]

I'll post a pic when I can get to my work pc. The stepping is due to simply having too few pixels across a small image. A 10m wide earthwork has in my understanding to be made from a 10 pixel wide image so there are simply not enough pixels to make a smooth or detailed slope. I'm hoping I'm wrong but I understand mTG to use a scale of 1m : 1px. Basically if I make a greyscale image to use as a height map then I cant change the size of the image relative to TG's base scale of 1m : 1px. But I cant seem to find any other way of making a small detailed area of displacement. Is this simply beyond the means of TG?
thanks
Richard

[Volker Harun]

There is no rule for 1m : 1 px. If you look at space renders with a whole planet, you have quite another scale.

[Matt]

There should be no problem mapping a 1024x1024 image onto a 30m x 30m patch of terrain.

If you are loading the image as a Heightfield, you can add a Heightfield Resize operator to change the scale of the heightfield without destroying any pixels in the heightfield image. The Heightfield Resize operator has two parameters:

Re-sample pixels
Re-size in metres

You want to use the latter.

Alternatively, you can use an Image Map Shader to displace using your image. In that case you choose the size in metres in that shader.

Matt