SSE Fun with heightmaps and landscaping

[Chiaro22]

I created a heightmap using the built in CK tools for it, and it seemed to work ok, but when re-opening the worldspace later it had lots of small tears between many cells. I googled it and found out that you could use soften vertices to smooth over the gaps, and that worked fine...until I found one cell that floated high up in the sky, towering way above the others. I tried to smooth over the edges, but as I caught the glimpse of a few other off in the horizon I just said "f%& it" and closed out of the CK. Upon re-opening the .esp I found that the floating cell (and it's buddies for as far as I dared to see) was not there anymore. Slightly optimistic I made some further edits, placed a couple of exterior houses (on the ground)(definetively on the ground!), saved, and went in-game only to find out that the last house placed floated in thin air, in a black void where the ground used to be...a whole cell had dissapeared from view, probably high up in the sky, or down below somewhere. I opened up the CK again and hey, what do you know: all the houses were solidly grounded on the, well, ground, or heightmap.

 

So, working with heightmaps/landscaping in the CK seems like a bumpy ride to me. Am I doing something wrong or what?

 

It's not very fun when the whole landscape turns into San Fransisco every 5 minutes because some random thing happened. Are there any best practices that I don't know about? Like; 1) don't actually try to edit the landscape, 2) oh no, please don't place a prop onto the heightmap after you've generated it or 3) did you drink coffee while working on this? Cause whatever you do; you just can't do that...it is known.

 

 

Workarounds/things I've learned so far:

-If there's tears and gaps between cells, use soften vertices to smooth over the gaps.

-If a cell goes missing (in-game), make a small edit to it in the CK.

Edited July 12, 2017 by Chiaro22

[Di0nysys]

It's possibly the way you're using the heightmap editor that's causing these gaps. The raise and noise tools usually produce very uneven terrain, which the game sometimes may translate into gaps. In the ht editor, raise areas but try to make the elevation gradual using the median tool (between the lower and heighten tools). Start out forming mountains and valleys, soften the results as you. Then when ur done, use the sedimentation generator a few times over to create a realistic terrain drift, very handy to give the world a lived in/eroded feel. The sedimentation tool also has built in soften as well.

Edit: I'm not sure if this is how u started, but it's best practice to start out your worldspace by creating a 128x128 region in the region editor on your world. This will ensure ample space and a square form, necessary for LOD generation.

Edited July 12, 2017 by Di0nysys

[TheDungeonDweller]

It will stay a bumpy ride because the heightmap editor for skyrim is not implemented fully. Beth used a grayscale image and a 3rd party tool like photoshop to produce their heightmaps.

 

Refer to this: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/809556-from-l3dt-to-skyrim-heightmap-tutorial/