Talk:Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Landscapes with heightmaps

Could those noob comments be removed or placed in a separate box? Especially the other one is confusing since it is so long. Preferably someone in the know of Blender could give a more detailed explanation for why the mentioned effect occurs, instead of us having a experimental "you can make it work with this hack"

.xcf textures
When I try and load my texture. It says Image can't be displayed in the image tab. Its an .xcf file, is that the problem? Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 206.172.238.58 (talk • contribs).
 * Yes, that's a problem. XCF is the GIMP native format, so you will need to save it as a PNG in GIMP for it to work. --Chelseafan528 (talk) 17:00, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

The image has no effect
Ok, I'm just about as NOOB as you can be, only started with the first tutorial here yesterday, so there is hope that I'm just missing something, branching off in the wrong direction somewhere: the height map image has no effect on the landscape, it's just random noise, as I would get without an image. I've done the same tutorial a few times now, always with the same result. One thing that is suspicious is that we start in edit mode, and later it says to switch into edit mode; when did we switch into object mode? [a little later:] In the next tutorial, the nor button is used, and I suspect that that is exaclty what is missing here, since the way it reads now we're turning color off in Map To, and nothing else on.

I'm a total noob as well but have been making great progress through these tutorials. However, this page is BADLY written! When we save an image in Photoshop, what format should we use? And the paragraph about bringing in your image is indecipherable. I don't see anywhere that it says "now you have your image", or "browse through your files to find your image." I can't get my image into Blender. I click on Add New in textures under Links & Pipelines and nothing happens. This whole page is vague, poorly written and frustrating. It keeps asking questions that as a beginner I don't know the answers to. Please if you know how to get my image, or what format, let me know!

For the ones above
I (random noob) figured this step out after a couple hours. I've updated the article in an attempt to make it easier to understand. To address your problems:
 * 1) Image: I don't know which formats blender supports, but it supports JPEG (lossy) and PNG (lossless) so it's a good idea to save the images you intend to use in one of those formats.
 * 2) Heighmap produce random noise: Most likely it's not random, you'll see a pattern (make a 128x128 grid and you'll see it for sure) because the heightmap will be tiled, not stretched when you apply it after scaling the grid. Scale the grid after you've done the noise thing (zoom in instead for the time being) and it should work great.

I hope this helps. I removed the "noob notes" (I wrote the first one anyways) as they could be confusing, but here they are:

Noob note: I recommend not scaling the grid yet. When I scaled the grid (Blender 2.44) before doing the "noise" thing i got the same result as described here

((Another Noob's response: I found out what causes that, sort of. When you load the height map image, the 'Map Image' box has a panel of buttons that affects this whole process - Extend, Clip, ClipCube, Repeat, and Checker. The default is Repeat, which just tiles the image over the scaled grid. From what I can tell, changing the MaxX and MaxY values from 1.000 to something far smaller, say 0.100, seems to partially fix the problem - with that setup I get an almost good result, except that it doesn't line up the image properly - it's more like four tiles meeting up at about center and going off of the grid in every direction. Oh, and also - larger images don't actually produce larger tiles, so making a 1200x1200 pixel image won't be any better at solving this than a 200x200 pixel image - you'll just get more detail in those tiles.

Request moving this section
"This entire Tutorial presumes that you are already familiar with other Editing Software, such as GIMP... and already know how to create "textures" with that software. In other words, this is not a "Noob Tutorial" for individuals who are very new to Blender, as it does not, unfortunately explain in any way, how to create Textures within Blender to complete this Height Mapping stuff it is trying to teach"

For this reason, I do not think this tutorial belongs in the "Learn to Model" section. This would be better fit in the "Advanced" or "Miscellaneous" tutorial sections. --Zilch (talk) 07:23, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

16-bit capability
Can Blender load and fully utilize 16-bit png or 16- or 32-bit tiff heightfields?