I made a gray scale image in Photoshop, 500 x 500 pixels at 300 dpi. I then painted a subtle image and then gave it a gaussian blur of 30 to smooth it out and saved is as a jpeg. When I took it over to Vista Pro 4 it comes out looking waffely. Not what I was looking for. How can I fix it? I tried saving it as a bmp and a Tif with same results.

Are you, in fact, asking in the correct forum? You mention Vista Pro in your first post.

I've tried your image in Vue, and it works fine.

I said Vista Pro, which was my first terrain creation program that I had for the Amiga in the early '90s, but what I meant was Vue 4. If it worked, what were your settings in the Terrain editor? How come the waffels?

Never seen a pattern like that in Terrain Editor.

1. Did you check the "fractal" checkbox at the start? That would be incorrect, as you are using a heightmap to create a terrain mesh, not a procedural ('fractal") terrain.

2. Best to use multiples of 16 (256 x 256, 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024).

3. Usually you want a blend of 100%, so only the heightmap controls the terrain (unless you are mixing a heightmap + an existing terrain).

4. Not sure about Vue 4. Above is for Vue 5 Infinite.

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I initially tried it in Vue 5I, but then I loaded up Vue 4 and tried it again, and it also worked fine. No special settings; a 256x256 terrain, picture loaded with 100% in blend mode.

I don't know why it would produce that result. If you want to make the scene file available, zipped of course, I'm happy to download and try it here. (Please remove any included 3rd-party content first though.)

I tried the suggestions but same waffel results. I used the same gray scale file in Carrara 4 and got perfect results. I found what I was looking for. I would do it in Carrara but I don't like the trees that program produces.

Next idea?

Maybe time for a support ticket at e-on's web site?

But first:
Does it  it happen with all your gray scale maps, or just this one? Even if this one works for us and in Carrera, i'd still try another to be sure.
What format was your map in? Tried .psd? (works in V5i). If .jpg, tried with/without 'progressive'?
Tried with no blur?

That pattern you get looks like what i got when i imported Photoshop Shapes into Terrain Editor, then 'baked to polys' for export. You're not baking by chance?

...Just grasping at straws here...

Looks like your image is being tiled ?

Are you saving the image in a compressed format...try bmp just as a test. Even with tiff, if you save it compressed or choose a wrong byte order, that could be enough to screw it up.

Just a thought.

Cheers

I don't have Vue 4 (I have V5I), and got a reasonable image from your height-map with no real problems.

BUT: I have a little tickle in my back-brain from a thread I read (probably here) that seemed to say something to the effect that the texture-mapping mode can affect the terrain-mapping (as wierd as that seems). Since what you've got seems to be a tiling effect, maybe that's worth checking out? After all, it does rather look like what might happen if the height-map was applied in world-mapping mode instead of object-mapping mode..
No idea if this is any help, but it's possibly a blind-alley to chase down:-))

Cheers,
Diolma