Hello all,
I’m using jMonkey to do a bathymery visualization tool so I need to color the terrain according to the height on the heightmap.
The only way I came up to do this so far would be to make a texture the same size of the map with all the colors and then apply it the normal with (alpha map, color everything red). But I get the impression this is not the way to go.
Anybody can point me in the right direction?
Hello Kotoko,
You can use a Shader to do this. It’s actually very simple and you can learn how to do it in a few hours. Read Shaders tutorials on the net.
RenderMonkey is a GUI tool to assist you with writing Shaders. I recommend it a lot. 
I’m a complete beginner in CG world, you sure making a shader isn’t something that will take me days or weeks?
It’s an honest question, it sound really complex and easy to get lost into. 8O
P.S.:RenderMonkey is a windows only thing right?
It’s the feeling everybody gets, but when you read the tutorials, everything becomes obvious. It’s really a step I recommend to do. You will understand 3D engines a lot better after understanding how Shaders work.
And seriously, coloring a heightmap with a shader is barely one line of code. 
P.S.:RenderMonkey is a windows only thing right?
Ah I think it’s Windows only, yep . You can find other tools to write Shaders if you use Linux, but I don’t know them o.o
Ok I’ll give it a shot.
I was looking at this and was like 8O 
8O
But I guess having a tools should make it simpler.
There is a class from me that allows you to easily create an alphamap from a heightmap:
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/user-code-projects/forum/topic/heightmap-based-alpha-map/
It might just do the trick for you.
Thanks (looks like a really nice tool btw) but this is not exactly what I was talking about, the idea is to use plain colors, no textures.
Did you end up figuring out what to do with your issue? I want to do the same too