Terrain time!

Today I got some help from Mario (again) for setting up and preparing terrains using height maps.
Height maps are basically black and white images showing the intensity of a surface in a black and white image Black being the lowest point and slowly increasing in brightness to finally come to white at the highest intensity.

This is an example of a height map.

http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/broomstick/Examples/Away3D/as/embeds/Heightmap.jpg


In the example above, as mentioned before, you can see the black sections and the brighter sections of the image, what will happen is the lighter surfaces will extrude higher and more intense than the darker surfaces creating a terrain.

I plan to use some of these height maps and to edit them and allign them together to create a pod racing terrain, the textures will come at a later date but it should still look amazing.