Greyscale image -> height field ?

[Didée]

Well, this is hardly about AviSynth (except someone has made a monster script for just this task). But I feel it's probably the best place to get an answer ...

Is there a free application, preferably a simple one, to which I can feed an image, and that will draw me a height field from the image's Y values / grey levels?
Or do I have to refresh my faded-away POV-Ray scripting abilities? (Good idea, but time consuming...)

- Didée

[Wilbert]

What's a height field? Histogram?

[Mug Funky]

heightfield is a pseudo-3d object.

basically a greyscale image where x and y represent spatial coordinates, and intensity represents height.

an example would be the DEM digital elevation map format, used in geological surveying and making pretty pictures of landscapes.

[edit]

POVray's probably your best bet, didee. there's other stuff out there, but most of it isn't as simple (or may just be a huge download)

there's an opensource 3d app called "blender" - was developed by some game company (capcom? can't remember) and then bought by some rather altruistic people who opened it's source.

you could probably do displacement mapping in that...

[scharfis_brain]

several years ago, I was astonished by fractals.

I played a LOT with a tool called "fractint" (or similar)
I can remind, that there was a tool included, that made a height field out of a saved 8-bit fractal (palettised 8bit image, probably BMP)

oh, and before I forget to say: it was in good old MS-DOS...

maybe you find something useful...

[Didée]

Originally posted by scharfis_brain
I played a LOT with a tool called "fractint" (or similar)
Yeah, FractInt ... those were the days!
Before my PC(s) were busy 24/7 with digital video, they were busy 24/7 with rendering raytraces. And before raytracing, they were running 24/7 with FractInt ;) BTW, my first Hi-Res Mandelbrot image (10'000*7'500) was rendered on a CBM Commodore-64. The poor "breadbox" was smoking ~3 months to complete all the tiles ...

Okay, I'll dig out POV-Ray again for those height-fields. Isn't really a big issue, needs only a little time to get into it again.
But there is a big danger - POV-Ray's potential of making one addicted to it is even higher than digital video. I can almost feel the monkey on my back ;)

- Didée

[vidiot]

Originally posted by Didée
But there is a big danger - POV-Ray's potential of making one addicted to it is even higher than digital video. I can almost feel the monkey on my back ;)

- Didée
True.
But one good thing: POV - even in 3.6 is not able do do interlaced
renders for videos - so one problem is gone.
(Afaik - Pov is only able to do single frames or series of frames via the "clock-variable")

If you´re looking for a gui that supports you with visual feedback
for your experience with POV - try MORAY (Shareware 30 day).
There you can see your highfield in RT (wireframe) before the POV render.

As I mentioned before:
The day avisynth is integrated or has become a full blown video editor, POV has become a CAD Engine... :D

Vid