Landscape Height Maps How to Crop Stretched Edges

If you have loaded a landscape height map into your 3D editing program such as blender, you may find that the edges can get stretched vertically. To fix this is fairly straight forward and there are 2 ways in which this can be done. The ways below are both shown in Blender (but for cropping images it can be assumed that Maya or 3ds max will have similar functionality – aside from the 2nd way by sculpting).

Crop Edges

The first and the quickest is to go into the texture tab (at the bottom) and near the bottom there is a ‘Mapping’ and ‘Crop’ tab. (See image below – select the bottom texture tab).

In the ‘Crop’ section there are X and Y minimum and maximum values. If you reduce the value in the required side (this may require reducing max and increasing min) it will crop out the stretched edges.

The figure required to crop out the edge can be as low as 0.1 in minimum crop and as high as 0.9 in maximum crop, but this may take some trial and error to get the specific result you are are looking for.

The crop settings below nicely cropped out some stretched edges in the heightmap above.

Sculpting:

The second solution that I won’t go into detail here, is to simple go into sculpting mode and smooth out or sculpt the edges to the required shape. This is also fairly straight forward, but does require some basic knowledge on how to sculpt. You will also need to apply any subsurface division modifiers, so the sculpting can work correctly. If you would like more info on how to do this, please do drop a comment in the comment section of this post.