Height Maps editor

[Yuriy O]

Hi, guys.
Does anyone know of any free height maps editor that would allow make bmp maps like 40x446 pixels? I have to make them by hand in Photoshop and thought that would be great if there would be some tool that lets you see exactly what you make...

Thanks

[Yuriy O]

There's Leveller (http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/), but it's not free.


That might be too powerful for my purposes. I just need to create grayscale once, size of 40x400 :) Thanks anyway

[tolik]

I remember this from SDL coding times:
http://hme.sourceforge.net/

[luggage]

aren't they easy enough to generate in photoshop though? Or do you mean you want a 3d view of it at the same time? Otherwise the old cloud plugin does the trick.

[edit]
if you select black as your foreground colour and white as your background colour then render clouds you'll end up with a landscape type greyscale image. You can then use brightness\contrast controls to adjust it to make it shallower or blur it to make it smoother.

[EpicBoy]

That works if you just want something random to test with.

[Fost]

Geoscape 3D (http://www.geoscape3d.net/)
Very Good,
Very cheap (at $64.95)
Designed for games (i.e. you can export position lists of objects with tagged data)

Upcoming pro version has even better handling of object data (you'll be able to import 3d objects, position them, and tag them with data)

I'll just point out that I've evaluated just about every way of creating heightmaps over a period of 5 years, and this is the only off the shelf app that has come close to being useful for me. In fact the only thing I ever used that was better was in an house landscape editor we used back at Rage games on GunMetal for the Xbox.

[Fost]

That might be too powerful for my purposes. I just need to create grayscale once, size of 40x400 :) Thanks anyway
Sorry, missed that part!

The free version of Terragen (http://www.planetside.co.uk/) can create heightmaps up to the size of 513X513, and there's loads (http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/resources.shtml) of free filter plugins for it.