Terrain Lightmapper (Shadowmapper)
The free Terrain Lightmapper generates a lightmap (sometimes referred to as a shadowmap) texture for statically lighted 3D terrain. This terrain lightmap generator uses the original heightmap image, and not the tessellated terrain, thus providing per-pixel accurate lighting and shadows. This allows even very low-tessellated terrain to appear incredibly detailed. Thin erosion lines and small details in the heightmap that would be lost in triangulation become clearly defined in the shadows of the lightmap.
Since the terrain lightmap generator operates on the pixel level, the resulting lightmap can sometimes appear pixelated. For this reason a Gaussian blur filter has been built in as a post-processing step.
The Terrain Lightmapper allows for the specification of an ambient light color, as well as any number of distinctly colored light sources. As a result, a simple heightmap can be used to create a very detailed lightmap texture. This can be very helpful if polygon counts in terrain needs to be kept low, as the lightmap can give the appearance of detailed terrain even with very few polygons.
Example
| Input Heightmap | Output Lightmap |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Requirements
- Microsoft Windows
- DirectX 8.1a or higher
- Input heightmaps must be 24bit bitmaps