After making the straight geometry manipulation experiment I thought I would have a look at loading images in as relief maps, similar to the real-world products they’re offering at Shapeways. A relief map is when you take the colour of a pixel in an image and set that to the elevation of the image. While Unity is great for 3D, it doesn’t want to do much file I/O, so you’ll have to load images from elsewhere on the internet if you want to see something different. The default image supplied here is from Florida State U’s Laboratory for Computational Vision, and displays an actual height-map generated for this kind of purpose. If you want something else, just paste the link in and click ‘load image’, and as always in Unity, right-click for full-screen.
What I’ve got so far is not bad, but surprisingly noisy!
This much higher resolution than the mesh experiment, but Unity can’t get access to the webcam (without a struggle), so doing relief mapping from there will have to wait a while. As always, stay tuned!
