Meshing your heightmap - ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP GitHub Wiki

This is the 2nd tutorial in the series and meant for both US and non-US datasets.

Once again to create this I will be following my process that I followed for developing the Vandenberg Spaceforce Base, tile n35w121.

Requirements:

Creating a mesh with your heightmap

Now that you have a workable heightmap from the previous tutorial it's time to make it 3D. Load up blender, delete the default cube, add a plane. Subdivide this plane using simple subdivision modifiers until it has 8mil tris, should take two subdivision modifiers, 6 and 5.

It's important to use simple here or you will get beveling at the corners. Apply both of these modifiers and that's the basic setup.

Next up, add a displacement modifier, set the strength to 0.1 and midlevel to 0. Hit new then the little icon. Open up your normalized heightmap and you should see it start to deform the mesh.

If blender fails to open the file try opening the file, then rexporting it as a .tiff with Save IPTC data unchecked. Change the image color space from sRGB to Non-Color and uncheck half-float precision.

Go back to your modifiers tab and apply the modifier.

Next add a decimate modifier, I am using a ratio of 0.02 which knocks the vert count down to 85k verts which is much more manageable.

At this time I would save your blend file and that's the end of this tutorial, just some math, color mapping and combining it all together to go!

Continue to: Scaling Your Heightmap Mesh