[Award Winner] Building a ridge heightmap in PS

[su_liam]

Nice tutorial, thanks. I recently discovered this site and I've been excitedly playing with the tutorials here. I was following this one, trying to create a mountain range for a map I had planned, and ran into a problem.

I had several ridges close to each other in my height map sketch I started with:



Applying this method directly yielded an alienistic landscape with very smooth crater-like valleys between the ridges. This was generated using Photoshop's lighting effects rather than Bryce.

Here's a real life shaded relief by Tom Patterson of shadedrelief.com



Of course, this is from the Grand Tetons, so it doesn't do much to refute the "alienistic" statement.

I finally managed to get a "16-bit" version of my heightfield into Bryce. B6 doesn't seem to like 16-bit tiffs or pngs from PS CS. It seemed to do pgms okay, but I couldn't figure out how to convert photoshop output into pgm. The method outlined in shadedrelief required an app called bsmooth. I refuse to pay as much for a Classic app that hasn't seen any changes since 2001 as I paid for Bryce 6, and the trial version is limited to 196x196(?)! Then I found the CartoPGM PS plugin on reliefshading.com. So here's the result...