Hi AgentSmith,

I know its confusing, thats why I said that it took me a long time to understand the problem. To complicate things, English is not my native language :-)
Let me try to explain it in a more organized way:

1- Bryce's Terrain Editor always generates 16 bit maps with 65536 gray levels for the height of all terrains, no matter if they are native or imported, 256 x 256 bit or planetary resolution. The native maps render without noticeable steps or edges. Imported maps are another matter.

2- Since the human eye cannot distinguish much more than 256 levels of gray, all paint program tools and filters are designed to work with 8 bit resolution and are unable to edit a 16 bit gray map. PhotoShop can create and save 16 bit gray scale files, but the usual editing tools and filters are disabled in this mode, and Bryce wontt read those files. So 8 bit resolution is OK for the eyes, but it's lousy when used for height.

3- The other editable formats available for export/import are standard RGB color formats like BMP, TIF and JPG, that use 3 color channels with 8 bits each = 24 bits of color. The problem here is that we work with grays, not with color.

4- Some programs can record and recover the height info, combining 2 or 3 color channels to get 16 or 24 bit height info. Since neither PhotoShop nor Bryce can't do that, all RGB 3 color channels will end up with identical 8 bit 256 gray levels. You may check that looking into the PhotoShop Channels.

5- When importing those RGB map files, Bryce will have only 256 height data info to work with. So it makes a stepping conversion and theoretically the final 16 bit resolution terrain should have 256 height steps, where each step stands for 256 higher resolution levels. It's difficult to measure this, because the final renders always show some extra noise, as you may see in the picture above.

6- The only practical way to interchange terrain maps with Bryce in its full native resolution seems to be the PGM file import/export ( File Menu or Terrain Editor Export ). This format has one single 16 bit channel accepting 65536 gray levels. But how to edit PGM map files?

Unfortunately Bryces manual says nothing about this (and about other important stuff). The info here comes from my research on this subject and please correct me if I'm wrong.

The majority of height field editor programs I checked work only with RGB files. Wilbur reads PGM but doesnt write to it. Up to now only Leveller does the whole trick. I also found that we can use P3dO Explorer to open PGM maps.

For most landscapes scenes this terracing effect is of no importance. However, when modeling detailed objects with lattices, or for doing camera closeups in imported terrains, the only way to get rid of the steps is to apply global smoothing and loose relief details, since its almost impossible to apply local smoothing in large terrains using the Terrain Editor paint brush.

I believe that this subject is very important to improve our brycing and I would be glad to have some feedback from you all.

Fernando