When I've copied the esp to the creation kit and look at the heightmap it is only a tiny part of what it should be. http://i.imgur.com/67paE.jpg


This is the whole heightmap with what its using circled http://i.imgur.com/ScitB.png


and here is the output from TESAnnwyn, these numbers seem very wrong http://i.imgur.com/lzOsd.png

If your heightmap is 4096x4096, then the numbers seem right to me. But you have a lot of "overflows", which I think means you have a lot of areas on the heightmap that are too steep. 1800 meters doesn't seem like a tall mountain in real life, but for a heightmap of that size it's going to look enormously steep in-game. You should probably lower the brightness of the image to fix those overflows. For example, if you look at my heightmap that is 8192x8192, these "mountains" are only about 350 meters:
http://i.imgur.com/FbCWM.jpg

But they look pretty big in the game, because the scale of distance is so small.

The "heightmap editor" in the game can't zoom out to show a whole large heightmap, so you shouldn't bother checking with it. Just generate LOD and check in-game.

You should also flip the heightmap vertically before using TESAnnwyn.

Everything looks OK from the TESAnnwyn output..
Don't worry about the heightmap. it will only show a 1024x1024 area in that window. Iirc, you have to zoom out, bring up the preview window and then refresh the preview window (something along those lines). The preview window will then show the whole map.

Ah cool

I'll keep dropping the brightness.

Also thanks for letting me know that the ingame view is bad for heightmaps

I fixed the under/over flow issues by smoothing and lowering (or is it raising) the greyscale numbers so its darker and now working on the LOD stuff.

I take this this tutorial is the best for it http://hoddminir.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/generating-lods-in-creation-kit.html ?

Yeah, and you should just use oscape, it's the fastest and most reliable tool for LOD.

Oh, I should also add that I think the top of throat of the world in Skyrim is something like 600 meters above sea level. So your mountains would have been 3 times that height on a heightmap that's close to the same height/width.
Pathetic.

"This list of highest mountains in the world includes some 100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain with heights of at least 7,200 metres"

And they're probably like 20+ km in width.

762.74 m. Just a bit of Skyrim trivia. This is the height of the actual terrain, but ingame it's slightly more because there's a static on the top. I found this out while extending the Tamriel/Skyrim heighmap.

I see. 600 was just a quick guess by using player.getpos z at the top. I guess I wasn't too far off.

But I was measuring from sea level (-14000) not the bottom of the terrain (-27000)

So was I
The very tip of the terrain is 39392 game units Sea level is -14000 game units. Highest point above sea = 39392 + 14000 = 53392 game units.
1 meter = 70 game units.
Convert to meters...53392 / 70 = 762.74 meters

I only read that 1 meter is 70 game units, but that was for Oblivion (I think). It's possible that this number has changed for Skyrim. If it has, I'm totally wrong

Oh, I thought it was 80.
I looked at this:
http://www.creationkit.com/images/d/d1/UnitScaleRef.jpg

If 70 units is one meter, that guy is almost 2 meters tall (something like 136 game units, out of 140). I thought it was unlikely that he would be that tall, because even though nords are taller, the height difference isn't that big in Skyrim, and other races would all be pretty close to that height. Nord height offset is 1.03, so if that guy is 1.94 meters, the "standard" height is about 1.89... I always assumed the average height is 1.8 meters, but I don't know. Well, it doesn't really matter that much anyway, haha.

You could very well be right,...or maybe I read it wrong

[Edit]
Here's the information I used -

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Oblivion_Units

I said in my earlier post that I thought it was for Oblivion. Sure enough, it is. I'm not sure if it's the same unit measurements for Skyrim. They could have changed it.

Oh, you can check the rest of the heightmap by clicking around in the overview window. You can generate an overview from the view menu.