Is there a way of making mountains rise from the ground using height fields?
Could I animate some parameter and make it look like the mountain was
forming itself from the ground?
I thought of creating a heightfield and using different images as the source
of it. Thru pallete rotation I could achieve a similar effect? Just tripping
and dreaming away, but who knows?

Luiz Barreto

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On Wed, 28 Oct 1998 16:26:55 -0200, Luiz Barreto 
	<uw.### [at] uniwaycombr> wrote:
>Is there a way of making mountains rise from the ground using height fields?
>Could I animate some parameter and make it look like the mountain was
>forming itself from the ground?

Yes.  Animate the y-scale parameter.  Zero isn't allowed, but you can 
get as close to it as you want to start with something approximating 
a plane.  This is assuming you want the taller parts of the mountain 
to grow proportionately faster; if you want the mountain to thrust 
upward as if it were a solid object pushing out of the ground, you'll 
want to animate the water_level and y-translate parameters instead, 
reducing the water_level as you increase the y-translate.

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Very nice idea. If you just want the mountain to rise out of a totally flat
terrain, it's easy. Use scaling or water level, just like Ron described. If you
want it to grow out of rough terrain, that's more difficult. I'm this up as I
type, so I can't guarantee anything... But this is how I imagine it:
Get the POV superpatch at www.twysted.net, it has a feature called a procedural
height field (among many others). Map this height field with a layered pattern;
bottom layer being your original terrain map and top layer a map for your future
mountain (bozo or whatever, preferably with 2 component color_map). Sth. like
this:
pigment {bozo
	 color_map {[0 rgbt <0,0,0,1>]
	  	  [1 rgbt <clock/256,clock/256,clock/256,-1*clock/256>]}

Animating this _should_ give you a mountain smoothly rising from the terrain...
Just an idea. Sorry if this is not very clear. Feel free to ask, if you didn't
get it. I may try this out myself and see if it works...

I hope this helps
Margus

Luiz Barreto wrote:
> 
> Is there a way of making mountains rise from the ground using height fields?
> Could I animate some parameter and make it look like the mountain was
> forming itself from the ground?
> I thought of creating a heightfield and using different images as the source
> of it. Thru pallete rotation I could achieve a similar effect? Just tripping
> and dreaming away, but who knows?
> 
> Luiz Barreto

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On Thu, 29 Oct 1998 09:51:22 +0200, Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee> wrote:
>Very nice idea. If you just want the mountain to rise out of a totally flat
>terrain, it's easy. Use scaling or water level, just like Ron described. If you
>want it to grow out of rough terrain, that's more difficult. I'm this up as I
>type, so I can't guarantee anything... But this is how I imagine it:
>Get the POV superpatch at www.twysted.net, it has a feature called a procedural
>height field (among many others). 

Funny you should mention that; I wrote the procedural heightfield patch. :)
Assuming you have both images as TGA files already, you can do something like 
this (untested):

height_field {
  pattern 300, 300 {
    average 
    pigment_map {
      [1-clock image_map { tga "flatland.tga" } ]
      [  clock image_map { tga "mountain.tga" } ]
    }
    // rotate to move the image map from the x,y plane to the x,z plane
    // where pattern expects to find it.
    rotate 90*x
  }
} 

This should "morph" between the height_field represented by flatland.tga and 
the one represented by mountain.tga as clock goes from 0 to 1.  Increase or 
decrease the resolution of the pattern as needed (that's the 300,300).

Please note again that this will NOT work in the official version of POV.  
The 'pattern' keyword is only supported in the superpatch, which is 
currently beta software and not very well documented.  Thus, it's probably
not advisable for most new users to mess with it quite yet.

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