>   The very first thing you should try is to use double_illuminate to see if
> it's the known problem about normal inversion (although it doesn't seem so).
I tried that, but it didn't change anything, so I guess it's not the HF 
normal flipping problem.

> >   If it's not that, then it *might* be that your color depth is not high
> enough with respect to the resolution of the image. Even though you say
> that you are generating a 16-bit image, it just might be that the program
> you are using to generate the heightfield image just uses 256 different
> heights (which can be very insufficient with such high pixel resolution).

I'm guessing that probably wouldn't change the boxing effect I see in 
smoothed images, but that might help with trying to get the non smoothed 
image looking less stepped.  That's what I've been trying to do  
recently, but I am having problems finding a good image processing tool 
that can handle 16bit grayscale images.  I've been taking an 1000 x 1000 
8bit image (TGA converted from a DEM) and upscaling it to 5K x 5K, 
allowing Photoshop to do bicubic interpolation to create the additional 
16bit data between the original 8 bit image source pixels.  However, 
this obviously wouldn't create a truly smooth gradation since the delta 
is only a few pixels, so I'm probably seeing 500-1000 levels of gray 
instead of the full 16 bit range.  If I could get a smooth or blur 
operation on the 16bit data, I might get less stepping and hence get 
something usable.  

Any recommendations on good tools to smooth and manipulate 16bit 
grayscale images under win2000?  Photoshop is quite limited in it's 
16bit handling, and I'm not having any luck with Wilbur--it seems to 
produce a lot of empty images and lose data.  HLA didn't run under 
windows 2000.


> >   If nothing helps, just try making your heightfield image with lower
> pixel resolution.

yah, that makes correspondingly larger squares.  :)  I'm trying a few 
other tricks so see if I can figure out what's going on, including 
seeing if I can get a smoother 16bit terrain image souce.  Any other 
suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Lars

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