LE Heightmap Editing

[McclaudEagle]

For a while now, I've been working on a pretty big project for Skyrim. It's an island mod which will feature its own questline and lots of other stuff. At the moment, I am facing one difficulty with it; Heightmap Editing. Below is an extract from the lore of the island.

 

 

The island is characterised by its many hills and forests, with a group of small mountains in the near centre. There are a number of lakes surrounding the mountains, and the island has many cliffs on its coast.

 

http://oi43.tinypic.com/11m5nqf.jpg

 

In the above image, you can see one of the mountains on the island, which is supposed to be the biggest. Unfortunately, it doesn't look that good. It's horribly eroded, it looks more like a volcano than a mountain, and I'm finding it very hard to make a good looking bunch of mountains.

 

I do realize that the island itself will have to be made bigger to allow for a better range of landscape.

 

Does anyone here have any experience with heightmaps and might be willing to help me out with these mountains?

 

Thanks,

 

McclaudEagle

 

P.S. That image is the entire island in one frame, with the CK's uGrids set to 75.

 

[acidzebra]

I think that's a pretty good-looking volcano/mountain thing. Why not a volcano? Go with it ;)

 

Beth's workflow sort-of-described (external software for heightmap gen, then hand-editing)

http://www.creationkit.com/Heightmap_Editing

Someone with a lot of experience in that sort of thing (this is somewhat outdated but the general principles still apply)

http://hoddminir.blogspot.nl/2012/02/from-heightmap-to-worldspace-in-skyrim.html

just one of many terrain-generators (I know this one because it actually produces workable and very nice heightmaps)

http://www.geocontrol2.com/e_index.htm

 

I guess what I am saying is at that scale, automation is probably going to save you a lot of work/headache. I'm not sure if I've ever come across a freeware terrain generator or I would link it.

 

And speaking of automation, if you're looking to fill all that terrain (it's a LOT!) by hand you may want to look into the region generator

http://www.truancyfactory.com/tutorials/fallout3/fallout_regions.html

(fallout post but the same mechanism applies to skyrim)

 

it will take you longer to set up but at that scale it will save you time.

[McclaudEagle]

I'll be having a look at these now, thanks acidzebra.

 

One other problem I did notice with using the Heightmap Editor is that for some reason, the entire landmass drops in height by a small amount, but enough so that every object in the world is now floating.