Does anyone have any ideas as to how to go about this? Essentially the only data I have is like the image below, radar, which functions like a shadow relief. I want to create a heightmap (or if there is some other way to apply the texture from the data to terrain). As the data is unidirectional it essentially functions like an image with the light coming from the west. I know to create a normal map for example you require 4 images lit from each direction, so I know this is tricky
Is there any way to approximately derive the height from data like this?
No. Everything you do with just one light source off a regular image is a guess and nothing more.
Also a bad guess as light only on one side can give more false pasitives.
You would need an image taken with specific equipment that contains the height data, or just a lidar (2m precision) camera. They cost around $10,000 or so.
You need a good drone to put them on for aereal survey.
You probably can find cheaper solutions.
The question is:
Is it worth it to spend money and time to get data to be accurate, or should you just spend time making a mess with a terrain editor until you have somewhat ok looking results?
If you need it for scientific purposes, you may need to invest far more than $10k into it.
A proper lidar machine with a low margin for error costs a lot.
But if you are looking for data in a location that is hinabited, it may already be avaliable to you. You just have to search for whatever dtm are avaliable.
Also, you could take and stretch out the 20m dtm to get a starting point, and perfect it using the image you shared by accentuating whatever smoothing happened during the stretching process where it shouldn’t have happened.
Its more art work than science at that point.
Ps:
Also your image doesn’t seem to have any structure. You need the shadow of a know structure and the declination of the sun to even start positing what height you are looking at.
It doesn’t need to be accurate, a guess/false positives are alright. It’s just to get the texture on the terrain for better viewing of features. I already have a lower res elevation map of the region.
I can’t get any more data, this isn’t even from earth. Also the picture I posted is just a small cropping of the entire region which is nearly 100x100 km so the terrain editor isn’t an option.
So all of that said, is there any method to even get some texture out of the image? Again it doesn’t have to be accurate.
To get a texture? Just cut the image to the same slice as the heitmap(s) that govern the terrain and use them to make a material with each texture as an instance and the proper UV code to stretch it across each tile.
One pixel will equal one meter, so you won’t really get much out of it unless you are far from the terrain - but it could help in manually sculpting or placing things, possibly.
