Heightfield Shader

Node Description and Purpose: The Heightfield Shader is the basis for any heightfield terrain, allowing you to control location, colour, displacement, and fractal detail for the heightfield.

Additional tabs for Heightfield Shader

• Heightfield Shader - Colour Tab

• Heightfield Shader - Displacement Tab

• Heightfield Shader - Fractal Detail Tab

A heightmap or heightfield is an array of height values, usually in a grid which describe the height at specific points in a defined area. Heightfields are used to represent real-world and virtual terrain in a specific, easily converted format. Most heightfields can be represented as simple image data in grayscale, with black being minimum height and white being maximum height.

Literally, to change the position of something. In graphics terminology to displace a surface is to modify its geometric (3D) structure using reference data of some kind. For example, a grayscale image might be taken as input, with black areas indicating no displacement of the surface, and white indicating maximum displacement. In Terragen 2 displacement is used to create all terrain by taking heightfield or procedural data as input and using it to displace the normally flat sphere of the planet.