[LE] Best Way to Make a Decent-Sized New Land Mod: Messing with a heightmap or designing the entire world from scratch?

[BeastlyBeast]

Hey, guys. I am trying to embark on a New Land mod and started by making a heightmap of the world. It works just fine but I feel like it looks very unnatural. I tried my best to make the land hilly yet smooth, like actual ground, but it's quite difficult to do so in the heightmap editor without making plots of land that are flat and wide and unnatural looking. It would be good to note now that my land is around 10x10 cells, slightly smaller. I also recently tried my hand at making a custom world in L3DT and importing it to the CK. It works but because of the differences between the way L3dt's heightmaps work and the way the CK works, I have the same issues. What looks like nice smooth bumps and hills and decent mountain borders in L3DT looks rather flat - the mountains look like the hills I want and the central land is mostly flat save for some very minor, nearly unnoticeable variation in altitude, in the CK.

 

I was wondering if I should just keep trying my hand with heightmaps or if I should start from scratch and build the world as I go along. Any tips on how to see my world as it's final product and not the blank looking, unnatural canvas it is right now? It will be a larger mod than anything else I've designed, but no bigger than say maybe 3 towns, some dungeons, and a city - MAYBE 2 if I feel extremely ambitious but I doubt it; my mod purpose really only calls for one city. Would it be feasible to just build it as I went along?

 

 

[Di0nysys]

The heightmap editor has a nice erosion and smoothing function that can produce some interesting results. Experiment with different erosion and sedimentation levels and let it generate. It usually does take a while for it to finish calculation. But in my experience the results usually look good.

Edit:
You should consider making your worldspace slightly larger especially for LOD generation and ocean cutoff. In the regions tab, create a 32x32 region in order to make sure your world doesn't just cut out after 10 units.

Edited June 22, 2017 by Di0nysys

[BeastlyBeast]

Thank you for your advice! The noise tool really works. I set everything to fairly low numbers like 100-200 and Octaves to 3 or 4. Really helped to make the landcape look better! I also made the mountain region a fair bit smaller but kept the height. I'll probably make them look better toward the end. Right now, I think I want to map out where the main landmarks will be and then build them, then design the rest of the world around that! It's still a fairly flat land but not nearly as flat and lifeless as it was this morning and I can edit it as I go along.