Easter 'Blender' break...

So over the Easter break I attempted a few terrain maps in Blender of the site.

After a few hours my eyes were pretty sore from concentrating and the results aren't that amazing...but I was happy that I'm starting to understand a little more about how Blender operates.

Here are some examples of testing below:

Experiment 1

First I imported a photo of the site into photoshop and created layers according to height/depth. When importing images into blender, black inverts and white rises in height.

I just started with a section of the map to see the result in Blender.

River = black

Land = dark grey

Trees = light grey

Buildings = white

I then imported this into Blender

I abstracted the site by applying different modifers:

WAVE:

BEVEL:

Then I tried adding more 'Noise' in Edit mode

Mesh Deform created an interesting form:

Adding 'Wave'

Experiment 2:

For this experiment I just imported the greyscale version into Blender instead of altering the site map in photoshop. I then applied noise. In object mode added a smooth subsurface.

This terrain is pretty lumpy but it may be ok for rough diagrams.

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My next experiements will be refining the terrain and adding particle tracing elements and empties.