Mapdev:howto height blender

preparation

things to decide before beginning

• how large do you want the map to be?

blender can render images as large as your ram allows.. ive found that on a system with 4 gig of ram i can render easily and reliably a 2049x2049 height map, transalted into game units thats a 32x32 map size. more ram would allow larger maps, not sure what Spring's upper limit is.

rendering the texture map is a different story, its pretty difficult to render a 16384 pixels square map so i will leave that for another tutorial. It's Doable, but needs to be done in segments and stitched together later.. anyway.

and warning that this method wont be pixel perfect for now, because of the added pixel i will extend the tutorial to handle that later on. its not difficult.

1. open up blender
2. delete the default cube nd the light, since they arent used
3. add a plane
4. the plane is 2x2 units by default, so scale it up to the size you want.
5. before subdividing it get your camera organised
6. get your rendering settings organised
7. subdivide the plane to create the exact number of verts that you will see in game
8. pull out the sculpt brush and set up the restriction to only transform on the Z Axis
9. sculpt away
10. change the render to cycles
11. create the material node setup to render height to best prescision
12. happy times!

move onto the shading tutorial to get some helper maps for making other texture maps.