I am working on a Risk-like board game and I have a bunch of land territories that I would like to apply bump-mapping. Does anyone know a source for suggestions/tutorials on creating a heightmap given an existing texture? I assume that there is some way to do this in photoshop without having to actually completely re-draw the underlying bitmap in greyscale. Thanks Todd

Well, I don't know if this answers your question, but try HME
You can load a texture (has to be BMP) and it can convert it to a height map, according to the colors.
The program (it's made by me, btw) can run on any OS (uses SDL), but it's not endianess independent (made to work for PCs).

generaly speaking, using an object's color texture for the height map doesn't yeild good results. Having said that, the desaturate menu command in photoshop will convert all color to to grayscale.

Quote: Original post by tscott1213
I am working on a Risk-like board game and I have a bunch of land territories that I would like to apply bump-mapping.

Does anyone know a source for suggestions/tutorials on creating a heightmap given an existing texture? I assume that there is some way to do this in photoshop without having to actually completely re-draw the underlying bitmap in greyscale.

Thanks
Todd

You want to use Terragen: http://www.planetside.co.uk
You can import an image in .raw format (which photoshop can import/export).

Still, you should draw the bitmap in greyscale; it's the ONLY way you're going to get an accurate heightmap.

Thanks!