I developed a theoritical system of capturing heightmaps from something like a quarter, but I do not have the equipment to make it work. Not that the equipment is expensive, I just don't have it. Here's what it requires: Scanner Murky liquid (food dye?) Clear bottomed container (petri dish?) If I immerse the quarter into the murky liquid it should fill into the recesses on the quarter, shading them darker than the parts that are actually sitting on the glass. Now if we take the glass and place it on a scanner and scan it, it should give a somewhat accurate heightmap. With a little postwork, we should be able to fine tune it into what we want. Anybody want to give it a test run for me, and document what you get? My original plans for the problem involved sonar equipment (which I don't have), or like one of those toys with all the pins that you can put your hand in to get the imprint (which would only give 0 and 100 percent values) Any other theories are welcome as well.

interesting idea I tell you now that it would be killer helpful for the MoonGoat effect.

Not sure I'm entirely familiar with the MoonGoat effect

Wouldn't the liquid have to be 'dark' (or black) as well as murky?

yes, I was thinking either blue or purple food dye. I'm sure if you mixed them all together you'd get a near black color. But after that you'd just convert to grayscale in photoshop or whatever you use.

You could lose a lot of detail if the raised parts slope down to the base. For exampe, a coin (to use your example) such as a 'dime' (I have one in my hand) has a figure of a head on it. The head has topographical features that your method might not reveal to a scanner. Only the highest parts would touch the glass bottom through the liquid. Therefore, in the case of the dime, you would see the guy's ears and perhaps part of his hair or jaw-line, but the 'lower' features would be missing.

yes and the effect of cohesion (water sticking to the surface) would decrease the resolution

so we need a murkiness amount adjusted to give black/nearblack at a desired depth and something added to the water to reduce the surface tension of the water and hence the cohesion issue AND a very good quality (optically) container..... sounds interesting to me

If the water level were low enough you could also just use a digital camera (or a regular one if you really want to go through all that stuff). Gog, it'll be a while before I decipher everything you just said, but for now, that sounds interesting. I guess I could just go get a petri dish and some food dye and just try the danged experiment, but I'm broke until Friday.

Well, a digital camera might work, but what about the glare on the surface? I don't have any fancy equipment here. Like I said earlier though, any other theories on how to do this are welcome. Like sonar equipment, highly expensive, and I don't know if the resolution of it would be high enough. I also don't have the technical know how to plug a sonar screen into the computer and capture the image. If I really had the time for technical know how, I could hook up one of those pin toys to read what percentage of each pin is pushed down and convert that into a greyscale image on the computer, but I am neither a hardware geek or a programmer. I wish I was, but I'm not. The murky substance theory seems to be all I have right now. Well, I'm off to go look up cohesion in the dictionary for now, but keep bouncing ideas, this is getting interesting.