displacedatplace

isplacedatplace creates an object according to a height map. Displacement is similar to bump mapping, but instead of giving the effect of depth, it actually creates geometry according to an image file. Common uses include landscaping, carving & embossing, etc.
You can import TIFF, TGA, BMP and JPG image files. Color images will be treated as grayscale.

tip: Creating an image consisting of various degrees of white in the middle of a black background will give you a nice hill or mountain without the edge problem a random generator often has.

faq: The meshes this plugin makes are HUGE! Help!

First, you need to be aware of how displacedatplace works. If your original image is 200 x 200, that's 40,000 pixels. Each one of those becomes a polygon in the final mesh. Now, trueSpace only supports double sided polygons, so that makes 80,000 polygons in your final mesh. Triangulation usually doubles the amount of polygons. So that's 160,000 polygons from a 200 x 200 picture. What to do? Well, the easy answer is.. use a smaller picture. Just reduce it in an image editor. As a bonus, if you use Adobe Photoshop to reduce, it will use its smoothing algorithms and you'll end up with a nicer mesh. The other option is to use displacedatplace's ratio feature. You can go as low as using every 8th pixel, thus getting a mesh that is 8 times smaller.

examples:   

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