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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