I am growing more and more frustrated as the day goes on trying to wrap my brain around this. I've downloaded about 4 different pieces of software that are "supposed" to be the best ones for making a simple height map.

I simply cannot get this to work. I don't mind doing the LOD, Textures, etc all on my own, I simply need help making a heightmap that both works and doesnt cause the editor to crash. Please help!

This is basically what I am looking to make:

http://i.imgur.com/6ZsZy.png

Its a large image, but that is what I've been trying to make. A simple island. I needed the dark grey area to be above water and the highest points to be relitavely high, but not overkill.


If anyone can either help me make this a reality I'd be forever in your debt.

Have you tried using TESAnnwyn? I used it for my heightmap. If you want to use it, you need to enter in the commands directly, this is what I used: TESAnnwyn.exe -i Skyrim -p 1 -b 16 -d 4096x4096 -x -64 -y -64 -h -22192 -w NameOfWorldspace NameOfHeightmap.raw
Replacing the "NameOfWorldspace" with the name you want your worldspace to be named, and "NameOfHeightmap" with the name of the image you are using. You can also, if the land is too low, change the value after "-h" from -22192 to something higher, or lower if the land turns out to be too high.

If you're doing this method, however, you will need a 16 bit grayscale.RAW file as the heightmap. You can make the file in... well, the only program I know that can save .RAW files is Photoshop. If you can't convert the files yourself, I could do it for you. Unless you've been using .RAWs already.

If all of that is done properly, and you just can't load it into the CK, a rather inelegant solution would be converting it into a .ESM file. I used TES4Gecko for that, it's not that hard to use. Just load the .ESP into it and click on "convert to master". It worked for me.

And if, for whatever reason, none of these answers solved your problems, I could always try to make the file for you (at least the importing the heightmap part).

I hope I'm not being too confusing, I was just trying to solve every problem I could think of in one post.

I found a tutorial video and am currently following it's steps. Problem is, the last step has me needing to use OSCAPE which I cannot use, since I still run Windows XP...

Im loading the esp file I made with tesannwyn into CK right now, I'll see if that gives me the result I was looking for.

Crud, nothing showed up. I would greatly appriciate your help in this. I am looking to have a relitavely small island capable of housing a few things:

1. A mountain area with a small clearing (roughly the size of a dragon shrine area)
2. A trail leading down a path to a sizeable city (I'm thinking on the scale of Whiterun)
3. A vast forest area surrounding the city-area which leads to a cliff that overlooks the ocean.

So, basically a trail through a mountain island that would have the player starting in the clearing, wandering down the path to the town, (stuff happens here) then through the woods to the cliff...

Ok then, what exactly is your problem, and what did you do in the steps leading up to it? It would be helpful to know what went wrong.
Or you could try sending me the files, and I could try them out.

basically, I think its all working up to the point where I have to use Oscape to extract the mapfile. I followed this tutorial to the letter, but cannot run Oscape because I am running XP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUtqQUSTqh8&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

http://hoddminir.blogspot.com/2012/02/from-heightmap-to-worldspace-in-skyrim.html
Use this tutorial. You can ignore the part about using geocontrol.

I will do that either tonight (assuming I sober up) or tomorrow and let you know if it yeilds the results I am hoping for. Thank you Zip Zero, you are contributing to something amazing... I promise.