I think there is way too much red in the normal map below, but I don’t have any utility to visualize the heightmap from which it came and decide for certain. What utilities can I use for this?
Anyway, do you agree that there is too much red? x, y, z of the heightmap are all within the interval [0, 1]. The column of the heightmap maps to x, the row to z.
That is, I need a utility that can reconstruct a surface from the heightmap and optionally calculate the normal map from it.
Damn, yeah, there was too much red, as I calced x wrongly (from the row) and z from the column instead of the reverse If you flop the heightmap and normal map, you get the correct situation.
Sorry for bothering you. Normal maps make the scenes so beautiful, I couldn’t help but ask and my eye is not that sharp.
Thanks, I need to say though, that I did not create the normal map with a modeling program, but with my C++ utility. Also, the map is from a parametric surface. Maybe a modeling program script would be a better choice.
About the scale, yeah, the scale transforms the normals.
Still, how to reconstruct a surface from a heightmap, is there an easy utility to do that? Of course, there are ways to do it in every modeling program, but I don’t even know the basics of them.
Still, how to reconstruct a surface from a heightmap, is there an easy utility to do that?
By “surface”, do you mean how to generate a list of XYZ positions that represent the heightfield?
Well, for a heightfield, the value of the “color” at a position represents the displacement from a neutral height. Let’s say zero; that’s always a useful base height.
You know the X and Y position for a given height; it’s just the X and Y position in the texture for that value. Obviously, you will want to apply a transform to the X and Y values to put it into a reasonable world space. The same goes for the Z values, which are the “colors” in the heightmap. Pick a reasonable scale to apply to them, and you have a Z coordinate.
Thanks, I construct the heightmap by sampling a parametric surface, so I can (kind-of, in reality a reconstruction filter would be necessary and not all frequencies would be restored) reconstruct too, but, I was hoping there was some utility, say for viewing terrains, that does that for me. Otherwise, I’d have to write this utility myself and I don’t see any point in this, unless, perhaps, the denizens of these forums would like to see a utility like that