Creating a Terrain in Maya using 8 & 16bit Images

Our old friend Stuart Christensen returns with a look at creating terrain topology using displacements in Autodesk Maya with 8bit and 16 bit Photoshop images.

When you need “accurate” terrain of a specific location you can easily create a 3D terrain plane mesh in Photoshop as an 8 Bit, or 16 Bit mesh from an existing topographical type image. There are reasons for using either quality and in this tutorial by Stuart Christensen, we will explore how to work with an image of the terrain, and adjust the image for an accurate displacement map to directly output as a 3D mesh from Photoshop, and then import that mesh into Maya. This is Part 1 of a 2 part series, although you can watch them in any order you want. This is fun stuff! Enjoy.