Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Terrain Displacement

• Units = Feet
• Byte Order = "PC" (Intel)
• Header = None
• Grays = Equalize to Range*
• Bit Depth = 16
• Fill = Black

*Note: In the "Range" you need to enter your "Min Elevation" and "Max Elevation" from the rangeStatistics created on the previous page. This will equalize all of the greyscale images to the same black-to-white elevation ratios. That way they match up seamlessly when stitching them together. If you did not do it this way, the images would have drastic variances when stitched together and the displacement would have holes in it where neighboring images met. Being that we set the Units to Feet, you must enter the feet values for the elevation. If you need a calculator to convert meters to feet, you can download my script from Highend3D.com.

Click the [SAVE] button and accept the default name for the file. It will look something like:

• "GoldenLakes_971x1401_PC.raw"

The 971x1401 is the image size. You will need these numbers when reading the file into Photoshop later, so I just find it easier to leave them as part of the *.raw file name for reference. Go ahead and repeat this process to convert the rest of our 15 quads.

Here comes the fun part! Once you have all of your quads converted to *.raw files crack open Adobe Photoshop. Currently in Maya v. 6.5, Mental Ray has a texture limitation of 8k (8192 x 8192). Even though Mental Ray says it can handle 8k textures, I've had problems when using exactly 8k images, so I would just go a little smaller like around 8100 x 8100 resolution. Create a new document in Photoshop and set:

• Width = 8100
• Height = 8100
• Color = RGB 16 bit
• Background color = Black

If you are using different DEMs than we are downloading for this project you may need to have a larger image. Just make sure it is square so when we reduce it later it will fit evenly on your NURBS displacement plane, which will be square. Remember the final image has a max of 8k for Mental Ray.