How to create a terrain with a picture ?

Hi here is my question,

How can i have a terrain from a picture there is a software or something for convert it ?

I heard about height map but its dosnt work with my picture, here is my picture :

PS: I’m starting to learn UE5 for my personal project

up ?

Hey there @Head69100! Welcome back to the community! So what you’re going to need to do is translate that map to what’s called a height map! Height maps are grayscale maps that show depth based on the value of each pixel.

They look a bit like this:

So with the map you have in front of you however it gets a bit harder than just translating it to grayscale and plugging it in. This is because there’s shading, and water lines, and outlines. So you’d first have to do a bit of a “paint over” and make this map a grayscale heightmap with no outlines… Then you can import it with one of the tutorial I list below!

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Thanks for the answer i will try and come back if i’m stuck :stuck_out_tongue:

No worries, it will be definitely some work on that map. One method when seeing maps like this it’s better to make a copy, reduce contrast, blur/smooth manually on the mountains, mask out the water, then play with it until it looks good. It will take lots of tweaking but you can get fantastic results.

I’m here with a height map but when i upload it on ue its very horrible

The mountain is flat

Oh yeah it’s going to take more processing than that to get it to be more like a height map. You can still see where the lighting from the original is. Since this map is a bit more complex and isn’t an unlit orthographic map it’s going to be harder to work with for sure. However the mountain is anything but flat! Sometimes you need to increase the amplitude of the map a bit to see it more pronounced. Currently it’s reading out like this:

As you can see the shadow knocks the whole wall off the mountain. the lighter the pixel the higher it is. All of the shadow detail on the terrain cuts down the mountain are so high contrast they are causing high amplitude shifts. So now you have the general shape of the terrain you want it’ll need more processing.

The lighting info is really causing you the most pain points here. Did you freehand draw this or did you use another program to render out the terrain then draw over? If so are there any height passes? It could make this process much easier. If not it might even be more wise to recreate this in a terrain program like Gaia or World Painter or the like.