hi phil - yesterday late in the evening i succeeded converting the above bitmap into an obj file and imported it into poser and made a pp2 file out of it. i did some testrenders. see attached pics... (no postwork) i uvmapped it (texture tiles 2x2 times, so you have more details). i am not quite sure it is the thing you wanted. it looks quite good from distance, but very rough in closeups. i added a simple plane and adjusted it to simulate water, you can move the plane up and down to see the shoreline changing. the file has approx. 2 Meg in size and consists out of 128x128 vertices (sorry - that's my limit at the moment) - converting bigger image maps failed... let me know what do you think. if you are familiar with poser you could use some magnets to raise or lower parts of the terrain.

i'll upload the file within the next hours so you can download it at...

(only pp2 file, no textures, no waterplane).
just experiment to see whether it's usefull ...

have fun :)

joekurz (aka jenay)
http://www.joes3dfantasyworlds.com/