Brian,

Thanks for all of the ideas! I especially like iterating along a curve by iterating over an array of points on the curve since I had no clue about how I might do that otherwise.

I played around with HeightMap, though how it reads in image data is beyond my grasp. I haven't tried nodeeditor, but I looked at imagesampler.js and it's clearer to me there how the pixels are being read. It's good to know that I could do this on a nodeeditor canvas, though I worry that will create the problem of placing the results into the 3D world. I'll try out nodeeditor to get a feel for it.

I wrote out pseudocode over breakfast and the missing link is mapping 3D world coordinates to pixel coordinates, as you brought up in relation to texture maps. I see how I might do this with some manual input by using fiducial marks on the image, but I'm going to ask Michael if there's a way to get the coordinates of a background image directly.

Solving this problem purely in MoI may be beyond my limited abilities, so I'm going to try a last ditch solution with other software before I dig deeper into a script or node solution.

What does +imagetorect.zip do?