OpenScad Height Maps v0.5

I needed the ability to quickly generate a tile from a height map. A height map is essentially a grayscale picture. If you think of each of the 'pixel' values representing a 'z' value for a vertex in a mesh, then you can imagine applying those z values, and what you get is a mesh transformed into a 'landscape'.

This thing is just a further refinement of the technique in OpenScad.

Although I am highlighting the technique by applying it to what looks like a landscape, I've also applied it to font rendering as well. There are a couple of ways of doing fonts in OpenScad. One is to use a 'bitmap' and essentially do height mapping, by representing each pixel as a cube.

Another method is to use the font information, and use the outlines to actually draw polygons and linear_extrude() them.

Yet a third way is to use a tool to export the font outlines into a .dxf file, and then load from there with a linear_extrude.

What you can do here is take the font, generate grayscale ima