Heightmap to brick converter?

[Jaco van der Molen]

With many thanks to Roland, here is an example of a complete script to generate a kind of landscape with a "height map" from Excel.
Excel source and LDraw file attached.

Fun

I was playing around with actual landscape generating last night using a "Diamond square algorithm" lua module I found somewhere.
Unfortunately it was too slow (due to the hard coded max script run time) to generate any real sized ones.

Oh, I see. Very interesting. I know the Diamond square algorithm is used in games for example to create terrain.
I found a post on Stackoverflow how to make a Diamond square algorithm output to excel, but it doesn't work properly.
If we could somehow get a Diamond square algorithm to work in excel and it outputs numbers in cells, we could use your script.
Or better still straight in LDCad.

I have a few thoughts on this and what it should be able to do, but alas I am not a programmer so no idea how to make it.

My idea is as follows:

• Modify the script to use only 1x1 plates
  
• Be able to set user prefs like set up dimensions in baseplate format 16x16, 32x32 or 48x48
  
• Set up colors corresponding to plate height for terrain
  Ie. very global 0 = blue water, 1 = tan sand, 2 = bright green gras, 3 = green trees, 4 = DBG hill, 5 = LBG mountain, 6 = whith snow top
  

Then

• Using the Diamond square algorithm create output in Excel or straight in LDCad (?) to fill the height array
  
• Generate the LDraw model
  

That would be awesome.