OpenGL ES 2 for Android

Creating a Height Map

A height map is simply a two-dimensional map of heights, much like a topography map that you can find in an atlas. A simple way to create a height map is to use a grayscale image, with the light areas representing high ground and the dark areas representing low ground. Since it’s just an image, we can draw our own height map using any regular paint program and end up with something like the next figure. You can even download height maps of real terrain off the Internet from places like the National Elevation Dataset.^[56]

Figure 59. A height map example

We’ll use the height map from the preceding figure for this project, which ...