Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Terrain Displacement

In this tutorial you will learn how to create the image seen below using displacement in Mental Ray for Maya. This process was developed with the help of Eric Hanson over at The Gnomon Workshop while I was in his Digital Sets class at Gnomon.

To follow along with this tutorial you will need the following software installed on your machine:

Alias Maya with the Mental Ray plug-in loaded

Adobe Photoshop CS* or higher - For image stitching

WinZip or WinRar - To extract the files

Pull SDTS - To convert the DEM data to Raw files

Python - Required to run PullSDTS

* Note: You can use an older version of Photoshop, but you will be limited to 8-bit TIFF file output. With Photoshop CS you can export 16-bit TIFF files for finer displacement.

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