been trying to put a line of footprints across a bit of sand, the way i have been trying to do it is by making a flat terrain with a raised outline of a footprint on it, scaling it down and putting it in the required place, so rather than the footprint being a depression, its just a bump around the edges of the footprint. they wont be in closeup, so i figure this will give the impression of footprints well enough.

is there a better way to get a line of footprints? (i am using C5 standard btw)

my method is not working out very well so far :) i am sure if i persevere i will get the results i am after with it, but theres so much to C5 i figure i could well be missing a more effective way of doing it.

heres what i have come up with so far....

Firebat Down

Haven't tried this, but seems like a displacement map might be the way to go. On another plane.

there you go, i knew there would be something i had not even thought of!
will have a play with that at the next available opportunity.

Thanks Ren_Mem

Your welcome. May also convert a smaller terrain to to a vertex object and displace. The issue I can see happening with the plane or vertex obj may be getting it to follow the terrain correctly so probably could do smaller 1 or 2 footprints then replicate them. Show us if it works

An alternate solution might be to render an "altitude map" of your terrain from top view and export the grayscale to an image editor and "paint" in the footsteps. I used to use this method quite a bit in Bryce and I've discovered that it can work very well in Carrara also. It can also be cool if you do a topview render of your terrains' textures so that you can "bake" them in (you might want to disable shadows for this) and apply the bitmap to your your greyscale generated terrain. This bitmap can also be detailed in the image editor to match the altitude map; it's a very good way to add roads and other details to terrains.