Bob Ratliff wrote:

>    I am having a similar problem.  I am working on a project to use
> POV-Ray
> in Radio Astronomy.  My problem is that I have a "contour map" in
> false
> color that I want to use as my height field.  That way, I can get a
> good
> estimate of the shape of the radio source.  Do you know of anyway to
> do
> this?  I am basically wanting to turn a 2d map into a 3d contour map.

The first thing is that, if possible, the *brightness* of your false
color should correspond to the parameter that you want to map.  Given
that, the higher the resolution (the larger the size), the smoother your
image will be.  What you do, basically, is first, use the false color
image to make a special format gray scale height field map.  Then, you
use that to render the height field and lay the original false color
image on it.  The accompanying .zip file contains an example of the
process.  Gradmap.tga was randomly splotted together in CorelPaint.
Call that our original false color contour map.  It was fed to
gradhgt.pov, which was rendered with gradhgt.ini.  This produced
gradhgt.tga, a 16 bit grayscale height field map.  Using gradhgt.tga to
form the height field and gradmap.tga to color it, the final image,
gradimg.tga. was produced with gradimg.pov and gradimg.ini.  I used
POVWin to do this, but any version of POV would work.  Email if you need
a hand or more info.  This is easiest if your original map is square, as
this was, but other aspect ratios can be accommodated.  Good luck.

Jerry Anning
cle### [at] dholcom

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Download 'htfields.zip' (345 KB)