"Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote in message 
news:44c18cd0$1@news.povray.org...
> There's a method that uses 4 photos with controled lighting to produce
> a normal map after a fair amount of editing. This normal map can then
> be processed by a utility to produce a heightfield.
>
> Details about this method can be found at Ryan Clark's site.
> http://66.70.170.53/Ryan/heightmap/heightmap.html
> This method produces normal maps that have no blue channel data.
>

Thanks for the info.  That looks like a pretty good method, when you can 
control the lighting.  I've wished I had a way to do this on quite a few 
occasions, but I've often ended up finding some other shortcut, or I simply 
decided to do something entirely different.  I hope to try this method some 
day.

In cases where you can't control the lighting, I don't think there is a 
decent method.  I tried The Gimp plugin for "Shape from shading", but while 
it works fairly well for Mars satellite photos (and probably other satellite 
photos), it doesn't seem to work very well for other purposes.  If anyone 
wants to try it (it may work well, depending on what you're doing), here is 
a link: http://www.geocities.com/alreaud/gimp_plug-in/shapefs.html 
especially if you're studying the "Mars Face".  But if you want to use the 
data in POV-Ray as a heightfield, I guess you'll have to make your own 
heightfield image by using the dumped data (or email the author).

Post a reply to this message