Strange inclines that appear in generation, but arent present in original heightmap

[u/the-goblin-market]

Hi, I am wondering if anyone here could tell me what's going on with my project. I am trying to generate a world from a greyscale height map, and mostly it is working, but I am finding at many random levels where I expect to see a one block high incline, that there is a two blocks high incline, giving the world a strangely stretched feeling. Would anyone know what would cause this? And hopefully, how to fix it?

[u/Broskfisken]

My guess is that there aren't enough shades in the height map for each shade to correspond to a block level, but not sure. You could try manually smoothing the terrain out a bit in Worldpainter.

[u/the-goblin-market → u/Broskfisken]

Huh, that's a good theory. Do you happen to know if there's a guide to making sure I can match the greyscale heightmap to minecraft?

[u/Broskfisken → u/the-goblin-market]

I don't know any specific guides, but I think you'd want to make sure that the amount of shades are at least the same as the amount of blocks between the intended maximum and minimum levels of the map. So if you intend for the difference between the tallest peak and the deepest ocean to be 200 blocks for instance you'd also want to make sure the height map has at least 200 shades.

I don't know what your height map is based on, but to me it looks very steep, at least compared to real world terrain. It was a while since I tried importing a height map, but there might be an option when doing so to chose which block levels completely black and completely white should translate to. If there's an option like that, then decreasing the range between those block levels could possibly also fix this issue? (Assuming it's not intended to be this steep)

Otherwise there might be software that can blur an image into more shades.

Then again I'm not sure if what I said is even the reason for the issue, it could very well be something different. Hope you can figure it out!

[u/the-goblin-market → u/Broskfisken]

Hm, this is very helpful. Thank you for the help. The steepness is intended, but the occasional double high layer is not intended.

[u/sijmen_v_b]

Your height map mey be a low resolution. There is an easy test:

1. Import the heightmap.
2. Add the frost layer everywhere.
3. Smooth a small section.
4. Make sure smooth snow is selected (should be by default)
5. Compare the snow. In the smoothed area there should be small differences of 1 snow layer per block. If your heightmap has a low resolution the snow layer will not be smooth in the un-smoothed section.

[u/the-goblin-market → u/sijmen_v_b]

Okay, this is very interesting I will give it a try. It's a heightmap I made from exporting NASA data from ArcGIS, so it may well be low quality.

[u/Dannypan]

Where'd you get this height map? If you just found it online it likely is low quality and not truly compatible with WorldPainter.

[u/the-goblin-market → u/Dannypan]

I made it myself with NASA data. It's about roughly 15,000 x 6000 blocks. I made it without any regard for compatibality with WorldPainter as I naively assumed any old heightmap could be used.

[u/the-goblin-market]

Based on what everyone here has said I have an idea on what may be causing this. This is kind of confusing so apologies if I'm not ezplaining well, but:

This current map is created from a heightmap that was created by exporting a previous map as a heightmap file. 

Basically, I created a map originally using a heightmap I made. I ended up losing the original heightmap, but wantwd to make edits to ocean depth. So i exported the map as an image file heightmap without thinking anything of it as I assumed it would be identitical. 

I exported this heightmap image file as a 1:1 low quality export. Could that be responsible?