Originally posted by BenDover
hey, how did you do that?
It was relatively straightforward. I fired up Vista Pro, a terrain-rendering program I have (purely for the DEM data it has) and loaded a terrain file for Granite Park. I exported the elevation data as a grayscale file, giving me the image at the top left below. Then I loaded the image into Paint Shop Pro and used the Topography effect on it, adjusting the parameters until I got something I liked; that gave me the image at the top right below.
For my original example, I just laid down a new layer of solid green, but for the example in this message I went back to Vista Pro and exported the terrain colors; this is the image at the lower left below. I took that image and pasted it over the topography as a new layer, set it under the topography layer, set the mode of the topography layer to 'multiply', and adjusted the opacity of the topography layer until I got a result I liked, which is the image at the lower right below. (it's a desert canyon, which is why the colors are what they are)
With the same amount of fiddling with screenshots for terrain colors and exported heightfields for topography, it should be relatively easy to do this with any terrain data.