Am 20.08.2015 um 02:17 schrieb Mike Horvath:
> On 8/18/2015 12:48 PM, Stephen wrote:
>> On 8/18/2015 5:22 PM, Mike Horvath wrote:
>>> Can POVray produce images suitable for using as heightfields?
>>
>> Yes, use an orthographic camera and a square aspect ratio.
>>
>> But I don't have enough experience to guide you on the slope pattern.
>>
> 
> What I mean is, isn't there a special 16 bit format used by
> heightfields? Can POVray save as this special format?

There /used/ to be a special variant of the .gif format known as POT
files, back in the good old times when most file formats were limited to
8 bit (total!) per pixel.

To my knowledge, POV-Ray was never able to write this format itself (in
fact it seems that the only commonly known program that ever wrote this
type of format was the infamous FractInt), and I'm not even sure whether
POV-Ray can still read it.

Also IIRC there's some hackish solution in the code for using two colour
channels of a 3*8 bits-per-pixel file format to achieve a depth of 16
bits; again, I'm not sure whether POV-Ray can also write this format.

Be that as it may, all those solutions are pretty much obsolete these
days; POV-Ray can use any of the supported image file formats for height
field data input, including several contemporary ones that natively
support a depth of 16 bits per colour channel (such as PNG).

To generate an output file with 16 bits per colour channel, use the
"Bits_Per_Color=n" ini file option, or the "+Fxn" command-line option
where "x" is the letter representing the desired file type, such as "N"
for PNG.

Specifically for the use with height fields, POV-Ray also supports
greyscale-only 16-bit file output (which saves a bit of disk space and
is faster and more memory-efficient when used as input) for the PNG file
format; to enable this, use "Greyscale_Output=true" or "+FNg".


One thing worth noting is that you should specify the "File_Gamma=1" ini
file option and "assumed_gamma 1.0" global scene setting when generating
files for height fields.

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