Creating Heightmaps

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys, I’ve been working on a voxel terrain of late and its been going well.

But now i must ask of you, how is the best way to generate a heightmap from a series of values?

Would perlin noise be the best way to achieve this?

Creating the values ----> Applying them to a texture --------> Grayscaling it -----------> My reading code
^That is my train of thought right now

What I have right now is the ability to read the pixels in a heightmap and build a voxel terrain from it, all I need to do now is to make the heightmap randomly.

Any help/starting points is appreciated, thanks.

Myhijim

2

I think you dont need to apply it on a texture or grayscale them,
just create “grayscaled” values on the fly for the terrain (or put the values into array first and read from there)

3

I want to apply to a texture, so the level can be extremely easily loaded again.

Any ideas where to start on generatin the values?

4

Actually this diamond square thing might be useful also (just would have to fix those visible sharp “corners” / grids or make a new better version of it)
Diamond Square Algorithm « Unity Coding – Unity3D (see image#4)

Quick test for basic perlin (js), put this script to plane object:

#pragma strict
private var size:int=128;
private var noiseScale:float = 0.02;

function Start () 
{
	// create texture image
    var texture = new Texture2D (size, size);
    renderer.material.mainTexture = texture;
	
	// draw heighmap
	for (var y:int=0;y<size;y++)
	{
		for (var x:int=0;x<size;x++)
		{
			var value:float = Mathf.PerlinNoise(x*noiseScale,y*noiseScale);
			texture.SetPixel(x,y,new Color(value,value,value,1));
		}
	}
	texture.Apply();
}

Edit: See this for noises,
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/68764-LibNoise-Ported-to-Unity

5

Thank you very much, shall try in a min

Works perfectly thanks