Well, in terms of creating one, you generally can't see that number of shades of grey (a limit of the human eye) so how would you be able to paint one (in the generic way you use paint programs)? Since your eyes cannot see that many levels, you would effectively still be painting in 8bit, and the extra 8bits would end up being high frequency, random noise. Think of it this way, you look at an image that looks to be all one shade of grey, so you expect it to create a flat plane for a heightfield...but in fact, it's 16bit and you couldn't see that it wasn't quite all the same colour, so the heightfield would show random noise (but relatively small amplitude). So, in directly painting, the extra 8bits doesn't buy you anything. Where it does help is in applying some type of function, say a blurring affect...then you would get more "resolution" in the effect. There are programs that can perform all sorts of functions on 16bit greyscales. I fiddled with Heightfield Lab (a command line program)...a bit difficult at times, but it has a lot of effects. I think it imports pictures as well. What you want is a program specifically for creating heightfields. check out www.povray.org->pov links->3D programs->heightfield modeling. -karl