Newbie advice needed on replicatiing Island shape

[mc3]

Hi!

I am about to start my first Bryce project. I wish to create a birds eye view of a specific Island in the Caribbean. It is a small Island that actually exists. I need to create the shape of the Island in Bryce so that it matches the shape that you see on a map of that Island.

I thought that the best approach would be to trace the shape from a scanned map (looking top down) in Illustartor or Freehand, then import that file in Bryce. However, in the chapter on "Working with other applications" it does not mention Illustrator or Freehand as apps that are supported for import.

It looks like I can import a Photoshop file or JPEG, but does Bryce have the tools to trace the shape of the Island from the imported Photoshop file, then once the trace is done, can it be manipulated in 3D space?

Thanks for any advice! Looking forward to my first adventure in Bryce!

Thanks

mc3

 

[sprkster]

I've done this before by scanning the image and opening it in either a vector or pixel based drawing program, and then reducing the image to a gray scale height map. Just make sure that island is in shades of gray and white and the ocean, which I assume is the part you don't want, is black. Your image can be as simple as a white island on a black ground. Save it as a jpeg or bitmap and import it into the terrain editor in Bryce and go from there.

 

[squirrelT]

The other way to do this would be to monopolise on bryces ability to import USGS (United States Geology Survey) elevation files (these DEM files are made as Height-to-greyscale (h2g) maps which will load into a terrain polygon object and displace it to form the perfect representation (various scales are available ie to metre or kilometre scales) of your geography.

The only problem with this is finding the satellite image h2g elevation map that you want. They can be hard to find but if you look on their site you may be lucky, you may even find your local terrain in there.