Creating a heightmap for mountains

[tfritzsche]

bluring/smudging the edge to create gray areas, the smoother the transition the smoother the mountain.

[Quadart]

Creating grayscale height maps/DEMs by hand in Photoshop is a tricky art.
Softly graded edges are import to create smooth slopes. I use fractal maps I dug up from web searches along with working on many Photoshop layers. It takes much trial and error every time to get them right, and I’ve done hundreds of them. It is also important to work with 16 bit files. 8 bit files will render out “stair stepped slopes” which can ruin all of your hard work. So always start out with a file that’s at least 16 bits.

http://billmelvinart.com/client3/GeoBlockWk.jpg

[stylEmon]

great examples!

[BeDrinkab1e]

That example is great! My biggest problem has been getting the smooth transitions between the black and grey, then to white. I've tried using the one of the standard brushes and many layers with slightly different tones. But when I take the resulting image and blur it to get the transistions less apparent, I will still get some ridges in the general area and it looks fake. The most important thing for me is to get the general shape of the actual mountain because I can use procedurals in Lightwave to make it look more like a real mountain. Any advice you have or any tools that you think would be helpful would be really great to know. Thanks for the help!

[trancor]

Start with gradiants/ramps and warp them to how the mountain formation is that you'd want. This will help with the ease between the colors. Then go in with brushes/dodge/burn.

[Quadart]

The way to accomplish what you are attempting is to build up your elevations in white on a separate layer over a black layer underneath using the airbrush tool set at 1% opacity. This should be done, without saying, using a digital pen utilizing shape dynamics. You are going to need the line tapering attribute of the stylus. Most people do not initially realize how extremely subtle deviations in tone create extremely dramatic effects when rendered as a displacement map. Most of my more complex DEMs consist of 10 or more layers for fine tune tweaking or rivers, cliffs, plateaus, mountains, etc.

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