Hi all

I am creating a new world and have made a heightmap, I followed Hoddminir's awesome tutorial but I am having some problems:
Look:
https://picasaweb.google.com/106764378683662164350/Avatars#5756862669455333330

My heightmap, is shown in the right bottom corner of the image above (it is actually a square picture 4096x4096, but I only use a little over the bottom half, so I cut the not so interesting half off)
I have tried a few different settings for s in the TESAnnwyn command, but the terraces wont ever smooth out, and I still get a lot of problems with the extreme "curves" and holes in the landscape.
TESAnnwyn command: TESAnnwyn.exe -i Skyrim -p 1 -b 16 -d 4096x4096 -s 0.05 -x -64 -y -64 -h -22192 -w AwsAwiaNW7 HeightmapforNW7.raw
If the s value was above 0.1 the terraces would be about two times the height of my character.
I actually haven't changed the value of h, but I don't really understand what it does.

In the process of making the heightmap, I started out by making a picture in gimp, save as a 8bit tiff, open in imagej save as raw 16bit, open in geocontrol save as 16bit tiff, make fixes in gimp and save as a 8bit tiff again, and at last import to imagej to export as 16bit raw.

I know I am making one "loop" more than what is necessary, and can that be the source to my struggles?


Thank you for any help or advice you can give me

PS when i change the bitlength too 16bit, the contrast of the image gets bigger, does that have a consequence, and why does that happen?

Converting 8bit to 16bit and back again ? Huge amount of information can be lost in this process. This could be your problem.

Your heightmap should start in 16bit and remain that way.

The terraces are due to lost information when converting to from a 16-bit format to an 8-bit format. 8-bit doesn't have the same range as 16-bit, so gradients won't be as smooth. As far as I know, only commercial products (e.g. Photoshop) and one open source project (CinePaint, latest version for Windows is from 2003 while the Linux version is from April 2012) support proper 16-bit image editing.

Did you remember to reduce the brightness of your heightmap, like Hoddminir says in http://hoddminir.blogspot.fi/2012/02/from-heightmap-to-worldspace-in-skyrim.html? In my experience the kinds of gaps that are in your landscape, have been due to sudden changes in elevation in the heightmap and a scale value that is too high. Are you getting underflow and/or overflow errors when creating the landscape with TESAnnwyn?

That was why i converted it back to 8bit in gimp xD because I wanted to reduce the brightness / reduce contrast I will try with the exported rawfile from geocontrol, and post here again

I had a look at the features page on the ImageJ website and you should be able to adjust brightness and contrast in ImageJ. You should be able to do the necessary adjustments there and not risk losing any detail that was generated with GeoControl.

Nice, i just couldn't find the function anywhere but I guess I just haven't been looking for it enough.
Is it correct that I have to reduce the contrast if I want to get rid of the "sudden changes in elevation"?, because reducing the brightness would just make the entire elevation lower, and therfore not change the difference between each pixel.

Yes. Just keep in mind that if the problems are caused by parts of the heightmap being significantly brighter than the rest, then by the time you've corrected that by reducing contrast you might have flattened the entire terrain.