Coloring specific regions of a relief

Coloring specific regions of a relief

I have generated a relief from a 2D image and would now like to highlight certain areas of the relief by changing their color. Unfortunately, these areas are not a simple function of the height. For example, imagine a relief of the Himalayas where I want to color Mt. Everest in its entirety.

What is the easiest way to do this? I can easily generate a binary 2D image that indicates which points should be colored.

I am an extreme novice in Cheetah3D and am using it to generate representations of scientific data.

Many thanks,

Melissa

It sounds like a simple job for a planar UV map with an image texture.

If you created your relief from a plane then your work is almost done since, by default, a plane is mapped to your UV map in the most obvious way (top-left of plane == top left of texture, bottom-right == bottom right).

So let's do this step-by-step:

1. Create a height map
2. Create a plane and set it to a large number of sections
3. Add a displacement modifier to the plane and load the height map into it
4. Create a new material and assign it to the plane
5. Open up your height map, make a copy of it, and draw whatever colors you want on it
6. Now add an image texture to your material's diffuse map, and load that image into it

In the example provided, I instead mapped the colored image into the "emission" component of the material so it glows, but it's the same idea.

Podperson,

Thanks! This is exactly what I wanted. Great idea to put the color in the "emission" component.

Melissa