Before we even get a scene with a camera setup, we would need something in the scene. An empty scene is not very exciting and we wouldn’t see any of the playing around with the camera. We already displayed meshes and scenes we created with CopperCube, so how about something we haven’t tried before? How about terrains?
As mentioned in the previous chapter, to create a terrain we need a height map and a texture. The height map represents the geometrical data of the terrain where black pixels are the lowest points of the terrain, white pixels are the highest points of the terrain, and every shade of gray represents a point in space between the highest and lowest point.
Note
There is a free application called ScapeMaker made by Dirk Plate and Matthias Buchetics that allows you to create a height map and textures with just a few steps. Unfortunately, ScapeMaker is only available for Windows platforms and has not been actively-developed for a few years now. Its official homepage...