Brightness Profile

I have often wanted a way to see a graphical representation of the gray scale brightness along a line. This is especially useful when making displacement maps, since the brightness profile will be displayed as a 3D surface contour. Say, for example, that you want to make a displacement map to represent the spherical dent resulting from someone hitting a soft metal with a ball peen hammer. You really don't need the absolute values, but seeing the shape of the gray scale profile can be very helpful. I threw together a crude one with FF as shown below. Has anyone else worked on this or knows of a more refined solution?



Profiler01.ffxml