[Requires the Flash 8 player. Click on the image to render the height map. Hit your browser’s “refresh” button to render it again]
During my oh-so-few free hours I have been playing around with the BitmapData object in the new Flash 8 player. This is what I have come up with most recently: A height map.
The possibilities for this kind of tool are quite exciting: 3d tiled terrain, height maps and data displays are just the beginning.
Right now the heightmap tool only works with grayscale images. I have a plan for performing real-time color substitution, but that will come with version 1.0. This is still a beta, somewhere around .6 or .7. When I feel comfortable with the completeness of this thing I will post some code. But first, a day or two without staring at this thing into the wee hours of the morning.