16bit heightmap

[wolas]

I found that someone have made those, but no mention how. I know that there exists some "heightmap painters, or creators" but that dont suit me. I want precision and prefer creating with gimp and it looks like it dont support such 16bit thingies. Maybe there is some convertors or something? I probably want to convert from 8bit -> 16 bit with some smoothing that would be perfect. Now my map looks crappy.

[PicassoCT]

╬®hem.. international Measurment Standard for no Idea...

Photoshoop and Blur?

[wolas]

I m using Linux, and not a fan of photoshop. Also gimp dont support 16bit channels. Now messing with imagemagick converting from 8 bit to 16bit and bluring 6x6 looks rather good, but not perfect...

[PicassoCT]

happy for you :D

[Beherith]

If you compile with mapconv, use -l option for some good lowpass filtering.

[wolas]

Well I use springMapconv which is linux version I guess. Just tried Mothers Mapconv version 2.4 updated by you, and -l does nothing, tried -q and without it and used .tiff as heightmap, + texture got corrupted. I ran it under wine, but once did it in virtualbox and it looked for me as simple blur isint it? Or it is some "clever" blur? If it is some clever blur maybe it will be worth messing with virtualbox.

[SirArtturi]

Quick google search and I found this plugin: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/

Any help?

AFAIK -l filter is just a blur, beherith might know better since he is mapconv oriented. However, dunno why you suggest filtering it with -l whatsoever, since it kills all the details and I understood wolas want precision?

[Pxtl]

It would be nice if you could provide a secondary map to Mapconv to mark areas as non-filtered and the filter would, in turn, give those areas higher weighting to the adjascent terrain so that the filter would be gradually feathering away from these hard spots. Then you could create terrain with hard edges. Of course, you'd have other problems since it would be tricky to get consistent slopes then, so it would still be hard to do inorganic terrain.

[wolas]

I already posted in Imagemagick(you can do pretty neat things with it) forums, maybe will get an answer, well I want accuracy, but simple blur I can do myself thats why I m asking :

It doesnt need very high precision as WWF RAW(weird looking ring, stairs etc) needed, but if it is possible I want as much as possible less blur. But probably using blur is simplest solution.

[Jools]

Gimp doesn't support 16-bit channels and also if you save the map as .raw then there's a problem with the byte order, which I think is inverted between different applications (IBM/Mac). I never got 16-bit raw working, so I used tiff and it works fine.

There was a thread on some other forum about Photoshop not showing the banding that occurs when you scale up a 8-bit image to 16-bit, they recommended fractscape intead, but I didn't manage to get my hands on that app.

[tizbac]

linux mapconv can do 16 bit blur , just use -smooth and 8 bit heightmap if you don't have programs to edit 16 bit images

[Johannes]

However, dunno why you suggest filtering it with -l whatsoever, since it kills all the details and I understood wolas want precision?

It hardly destroys any meaningful detail on most maps.

[smoth]

However, dunno why you suggest filtering it with -l whatsoever, since it kills all the details and I understood wolas want precision?

It hardly destroys any meaningful detail on most maps.

For something with hard edges it is devastating. But I agree most maps are crap and it doesn't hurt them.

Fwiw I could make what wolas needs for him but I don't like the map concept.

[wolas]

You dont even know what I m working on. And I dont need/wont beg you to make anything. If you talking about WWF RAW it is finished, it is ring it is small, desisigned for com wars, I like it/dont care what anybody thinks about it and it wont be any bigger.

+ I m running linux. And windows version mapconv works crappy under wine. Rebooting to windows/messing with virtualbox is too big pain for me.

Thanks for -smoth dunno why it is hidden in -h , but it looks like weak blur.

Found it. ImageMagick "convert -selective-blur" works almost perfectly.

[smoth]

Cool

[SirArtturi]

However, dunno why you suggest filtering it with -l whatsoever, since it kills all the details and I understood wolas want precision?

It hardly destroys any meaningful detail on most maps.

Define meaningful.

If you create high detailed 16-bit heightmap and render a texture for it -l filter really destroys it because the blurred heightmap doesnt match with the original texture anymore. If you design your heightmap with high care and precision from the very beginning, it's just foolish to run blur on it at the end of the process.

-l filter is only good for 8-bit heightmaps because of the jagged edges it tends to leave due 255 levels.

[Forboding Angel]

Interesting question... Would you consider my maps lacking in detail?

[Beherith]

Forb, you dont use high frequency components in your heightmaps, so they wouldnt be affected much by -l.

For example, if you are using worldmachine to bake a lightmap, then you absolutely want to keep the most heightmap detail you can to keep it accurate as Artturi said.

[SirArtturi]

Yes exactly.

Still I wonder why you use lowpass filter - just out of curiosity?

I know this analogy doesn't speak on behalf of my argument , but I think it clarifies my point: If you take a photo, why would you run immediately in photoshop to blur it?

Also! The more height variation, in other words, more higher the map, and more grayscales it has, more meaningful the details come. With 16-bits you can have 65,536 levels. Basically this means map as high as 65,536 spring elmos, correct me if im wrong. You can put a lot of detail into that.

About meaningfulness: Sure, It probably is not meaningful for basically flat maps. And most of the map, as Johannes said, aint going too deep on the details. So yeah you are correct...

Still why would you blur your map more? Can't see the point...

If you have 8 bit height map, and lets say it is using like 150 levels of gray, blur might be clever to run for it because it most probably will add more levels (hopefully it will use the full-scale 255 levels) to your heightmap and fix the jaggedness.

[Jools]

One question I wonder is whether a 16-bit mode is really useful if you begin with OTA maps, that are of small dimensions and then enlarge them. I know that you can't regain lost information by upscaling the image, but maybe something happens to the 8-but image when it's being processed.

So what is more important? Colour depth or dimension?