Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I probably should have made this a long time ago lol. Anyway, here's a heads up of progress on the heightmap, where it's at, and where it's going.

Alrighty, for a while there i was working on the height map in the buggy, clunky pain-in-the-arse Heghtmap Editor, part of the CS. It was going terribly, i can't really tell the sutble difference between two shades of aqua, so i couldn't see what I doing. Also it had this extremely annoying habit of generating landscape errors every time i put a small mound anywhere, which i then smotthed off, saved, it would generate them again, so i'd smooth and save, and it would generate them again, i'd start swearing (my language is more colourful than a US truck driver, when i'm working with the HME, lol). Anyway i got sick of that and so i was thinking of other options, when a friend gave me a copy of a terrain editor. So I've started playing around with that, and Oh My God, i wish i had this months ago!

Heres the heightmap TOYB made for me in greyscale (which has serious height limitations):
http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb249...lsweyr.jpg

And here it is, the raw file plugged into Vue:
http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb249...tmap01.jpg

Finally i can see what i'm doing! yay!

Anyway i've been playing around with it a bit, and heres what i've got so far:
http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb249...tmap02.jpg


The plan of attack with this terrain editor is to muck about till i'm happy with the heightmap using a smaller size map, then when i'm happy with the large scale features, scale it up, smooth it and add finer details lie stream beds etc. At the end i hope to export a 16-bit map to import using TESAnnwyn that (fingers crossed) i won't need to touch with the heightmap editor.

Thanks for the update JKJ - the whole project seems more real when you can see the heightmap coming together!

That looks like a really cool tool there! Just looking at the control panel makes me want to go play....

The heightmap looks really clean now, well done - and your workplan sounds like the only way to go. Please keep us all posted - I'm looking forward to screenies of some of the detailed areas when you get to them.

Just been fiddling a bit more with a larger map, still needs a bit more work, and the smoothing tool is very slow. but anyway tah-dah!:

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb249...tmap03.jpg

How's the heghtmap coming, Ja-Kha'jay? You may have seen I've been adding some landscape resources for the drylands, so I'm still at work on the resources, with emphasis on the stuff Sceluk will need for the region gen presets. He's got space and climate issues, but should be good to go in another few weeks, by which time I should be ready.

If you can be ready in time then I'd like to tentatively schedule the region generation to start in early October.

Oh my gosh, sorry i've not been around much lately, and the recent earthquake in mine and toyb's corner of the world have shaken everything up quite literally. anyway i've decided to put the tester heightmap file on here so we can get the ball rolling again (as our current HM converter lost his home in the quake, he's all in one piece though)

http://www.filefront.com/17272898/tesann...errmap.vue

right, this is just a a low quailty, test heightmap, which i've been using to see how it behaves during the conversion process. feel free to have a look at the file, and have a go at concerting it to the 16- bit RAW using Blender. Pleas note however the Private Learning Edition will not open, or convert this file, as is more restrictive than a Christian Girls Boarding School on Sunday. The torrent and keygen or Vue 8 Xtream are easy to find on the usual torrent sites

Once we have this dumy heightmap, we can use it to build region presets so when i'm done with the heightmap, we can get straight into it

Hi guys,

heres a few versions of the final heightmap to play around with:

http://rapidshare.com/files/422241252/VUEHM.7z

there's the original vue file, and obj file for those of you with blender to play around with, and a 3ds file too for those with 3dsmax. i'll be working more on it tomorrow, for now i have to go to work.

Great to see you back in action, JKJ.

Alrighty, an update.
After months of frustration, pulling my hair out, swearing, going on wild goose chases and stress, i am officially announcing the scrapping of the vue project.

I am sad to say that though fun in the beginning, it has proven impossible to tame the terrain editors (of which there are many) into exporting any thing more than an 8-bit greayscale image, which when imported looks like a landscape made by a 38 year old lego maniac in his mum's basement. in other words it disgustingly hideous and made me want to cry and barf at the same time as i realised that the entire effort was a complete waste of time. TOYB has been trying very hard to help out over the last few days, and what he's seen over the last few days, is the sheer frustration, anger and aguish at all my hard work going to pot. It framkly sucks. So as i'm leaving to go to China in a matter of hours, I'm handing all the heightmap files over to TOYB, who's going to see if he can sort something out.

Proof of Ja-Kha'jay's woes:





I've been going over every possible way of exporting out of vue to some other program that would allow us then to get it into the CS, but it's to no avail. So what's likely to happen is me working on an older version of the Heightmap to see if I can work some magic out of the HME. Notably, I however suck as using the editor, so fun times are ahead, but I'm switching it to priority #1 (even over Valenwood & High Rock work) because we're so close to being ready for region gen.

@Ja-Kha'jay - :hug:

Really sorry to hear this.