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Subject: Can Carrara do altitude mask or heightmap renders?

danamo opened this issue on May 19, 2006 · 8 posts

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danamo ( ) posted Fri, 19 May 2006 at 5:39 PM · edited Thu, 09 July 2026 at 1:42 AM

Forgive me if I ask a foolish question, but can Carrara5 do an altitude mask-type render? I have been looking 'round in both the manual and by using the search engine here(tutorials also), but I haven't found the answer. I used this feature a lot in Bryce, and I've got some new ideas(to me, at least) on how I could utilyze this using Carrara's abilities. I know that Carrara can import heightmaps into the terrain modeler. Thank's, DV

danamo ( ) posted Fri, 19 May 2006 at 8:51 PM

Here is an altitude mask render I did in Bryce5 of a celtic knot .obj that I designed in KnotPlot. I imported the "knot" and rotated it on the Y so it was parallel to the ground plane and did a top-view altitude mask render. I was thinking it might be possible to use something like this for a displacement map detail, or for a terrain.

cjd ( ) posted Fri, 19 May 2006 at 9:31 PM · edited Fri, 19 May 2006 at 9:32 PM

Hi danamo,

Yes, it is a rendering option.

Check the "fragment distance" box, and you will get a heightmap in an additional channel when you render. You also need to use .PSD or .TIFF as the file format to support the extra channel.

Chris