Today we’re going to give you a quick tutorial on how to use height maps in Blender. For those that aren’t familiar with Blender, it is a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
To get started, download Blender and then open up the software.
Once you have the Blender open, your screen should look similar to below.
Left click with your mouse and highlight everything in your scene, then click delete. You should the be left with a blank canvas.
In the 2nd top bar, go to “Add” and click UV sphere.
Now, in the top bar click on the “Sculpting” tab.
Now on the right hand side, click on the texture icon at the bottom.
Click on the New button.
Click on open and import the height map that you are using. For this example, I’m using a leaf.
Go to the top of the right side panel and scroll down to texture in the brush settings. Change the mapping to “View Plane”.
Next, scroll down to where you see Dyntopo and change the detail size. For this example, I’m setting mine to 2.
Back under brush settings, I’m changing the hardness to 1. (You can play with the different settings to get different results)
You can then adjust the brush size in the top bar or by clicking “F” on your keyboard.
Then using your mouse, just click on the sphere and you will see the effect of the height map you chose.
Now there are many different ways of achieving the same results but this was just a quick tutorial of how you can use the height maps. I chose to use Dyntopo in this example but you could re-mesh the sphere instead to add more vertices.
You can adjust any of the settings you wish as well to achieve different results.
I hope this tutorial was helpful and if you have any questions, leave a comment and let me know.