I am trying to convert a very dense mesh from 3ds Max into a heightmap for unity. It contains hundreds of thousands of vertex points and splitting it up into separate meshes so it will be under the vertex limits allowed by unity won’t work either. Does anyone know of a way which I can make it a 16-bit heightmap with a relatively high level of accuracy? There are gaps in the mesh where the roads are located.
Thanks,
I can be done using Blender:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Textures/Maps/Creating_a_Heightmap_from_a_Plane
Thanks for link, I tried to do this a month ago and couldn’t get it to work but after toiling around in Blender’s interface I got it to work. However according to the tutorial the final image is saved in a jpeg. This only gives 256 levels of color to the image and the result in Unity will be a terraced terrain (unless you save the image as 256x256 then the terrain will be smooth but will lack adequate detail for accurate terrains). I saved the image at 4096x4096 using the openexr format which is 32bit. I then converted it to a grayscale 16bit raw in photoshop. Note: You have to flip the image horizontally for it to show up correctly in Unity. Before you scale down the mesh in Blender to 2x2 blender units you need to know its height and width located in the transform properties (n) so you can correctly scale the heightmap when importing to unity. Also make sure your mesh is continuous with no holes or they will produce spikes. This is still a work in progress as the terrain isn’t quite proportionally correct but it is very usable as long as you follow everything carefully. I would like to know if anyone has done this accurately in Modo since that is my main 3d app.
Thanks for your help
Out of curiosity, what was that original mesh output from? Civil3D?