[Tutorial] DarkAsmodeous's New Heightmap Tutorial

[DarkAsmodeous]

First I must extend a thanks to Lightwave for his wonderful help, as well as for his wonderful application TESannwyn, though my experiences with it did not always match his advice or readme, it is a wonderful application with amazing possibilities.

The purpose of this tutorial is to relate my experiences with success and failure using TESannwyn, and how I managed to create a 4096x4096 Heightmap with it.

To begin with, find an image of the map you wish to create, or if you are creating an original landmass, know what sort of shape you want. Also, download TESannwyn, and I reccomend the new CS in order to escape the 6*6 LOD limitation.

1) Create an outline of the map you wish to create in a greyscale 8 bit .bmp, using a transperant layer in PS for tracing if you'd like. (255,255,255 for land, 0,0,0 for sea) Make it 1024*1024

2) Take this file and import it into TESannwyn using the settings -s 0.49 (in order to break up the jump between colors to allow the CS to read it) and -h -512 in order to get the sea to -127 and the land to 127, a shallow sea and some land.

3) Open the created .esp in the CS editor and play with the noise settings to add detail to the landmass as you wish

4) Export the quads, and move Q2.raw to the directory you installed TESannwyn to

5) In photoshop, scale the image to the size you want using the bicubic smoother setting and run blur on it once or twice in order to help make it a bit less blocky.

Added step: In PS flip the image verticaly, as TESannwyn does this on import

6) Import the new file with a setting of -s 0.25 in order to change the height values the exporter assigns back into ones that the CS can read (flaw in the CS), then use -h to modify the height (Lightwave reccomends -1024, however I have found this doesn't work, and in my experience a value of -8192 is needed, try each) and use a setting of -d whateverresolutionXwhateverresolution

7) Check it out in the CS to be sure it worked!

Things to be aware of:

1) In my experience using the -w command to create the land in another worldspace leads to flattened land

2) It seems that sometimes the CS begins to use some sort of cached memory if you use the same .esp file name too often with a new landmass, I'm not sure exactly why or when, but changing the .esp name can solve some problems

3) You too may have to play with height values to find the right one, just as I had to, but keep trying!

4) The land may be a bit blocky and the detail won't be very exact or perfect, but it should be perfect for getting your mod rolling!

I would never have been able to learn or do any of this without Lightwave!

Good luck!