I'm no pro, just an art prof :? if you find errors in this, please let me know.Īlso, there's the shuttle radar topography mission imagery as well, a global height-map database. of course this can be remedied pretty easily in photoshop. it will seem squished in the north-south dimension.
One thing this tutorial leaves out (which i'll add shortly) is that one should download the aerial photo imagery at the same time if you want it to match perfectly with the terrain also, most of this data gives you non-orthographic imagery, i.e. all thanks to a little program called landserf. pdf tutorial (for macs) on getting elevation data off the USGS website and converting it into grayscale heightmaps for displacement in maya. i had my students make 3D maps of their home towns at the beginning of our maya/3D animation course here at st. I've been having a lot of fun using height map data to recreate actual terrains.
