Okay, so, I'm trying to create a heightmap of this (pardon the size, people) which I am working on in Photoshop:

http://www.furtales.com/blitterbug/blackmount-hmsample.jpg

I've tried every heightmap tutorial I can find. They not terribly informative. As a newcomer to modding, I find this rather frustrating when concise, step-by-step instructions shouldn't be so hard to find! Anyway. When import my .raw files, they a) import as severely fragmented files and b) crash the hell out of my computer... which runs the rest of the CS fine, it's just the heightmap system that causes this. Go figure.

Anyway, this is about as far as I can get:
- Create a new Worldspace called BlackmountWorld [check]
- Save file as a new .esp called Blackmount [check]
- Generate a heightmap, import existing data [fail]

The only time it kind of worked, the region was about 200 cells wide (I've been aiming for something only half the size of Cryodiil), and the mountains stretched to the moon. Sooo I've probably done something wrong on the black-to-white, and sadly, no tutorial I can find explains this at all.

Anyway, appreciate any help that people can offer on the process/art of heightmapping

make sure its a greyscale image and not just using greyscale colours, if your using photoshop go and open it and goto image>mode>greyscale

This doesnt mean it will work or is even the problem, but some heightmap renders chuck the turd if its a colour image using greyscale colours rather then a true greyscale.

Reason for this instead of having a grey channel and an alpha channel, the image has r/g/b channels and an alpha channel.

I should point out some eightmap programs are the reverse too, and if its a true greyscale image chuck the turd because they want a r/g/b channels.

As far as I've been able to determine, the heightmap editor only seems to support 1 quad when using a base image. Although admittdely I havn't had any luck with importing maps from outside, and found the whole process a great deal more annoying and time consuming than just making the worldspace manually within the heightmap editor. Although it may read the image, the scaling and locations of points relative to eachother can often cause enough problems, in and of themselves... And I was using an outside program which was exporting as the proper file format at the time too.

Generally, it's best to just work within the heightmap editor, especially when you aren't trying to match a specific form. Once you become familiar with all the settings and controls within the editor, making good worldspaces becomes MUCH easier.

Also, 200 cells is very large, and may be more than your computer can handle at once. Unless you really NEED that much space, you are usually best off just working with the 4 quads that you see when you start up the heightmap editor. You can always add to this area later, once the finished area has been turned into a .esm for basing. The main reason why the heightmap editor crashes (constantly) is because people try doing extremely large areas within a single sitting, and the heightmap editor alone requires quite alot of ram just to work. Working on the landscape in stages, merging esp to .esm, also makes saving the mod take less time, and allows an option to undo changes which were saved by working from a previous version of the worldspace.esm. This also sets you up nicely for the next step of a worldspace, regions, where it is STRONGLY recommended that all the region data be worked with in a .esp which is dependant on the worldspace.esm.

Additionally, working with a small world means less time spent going through cell by cell fixing everything.

You could try to give us your specs to rule out that system performance's the issue.

In case that's it I *think* that I could lend you a hand, got two and a half gigs of ram myself.

<< make sure its a greyscale image and not just using greyscale colours >>

I did not know this, so thanks for the tip!


<< Also, 200 cells is very large >>

Yes, that part was unintentional I'd meant to work with far less than that (around 60-80) to make things a little less work while still feeling like it's a sizeable region. The 200 cells surprised the heck out of me, but it was probably caused by trying to work with more than one quad.


<< You could try to give us your specs to rule out that system performance's the issue. >>

I'm using 1GB DDR2 RAM and a Radeon X1650 graphics card, though the system is Pentium 4 2.93GHz and about 3 years old now, so serviceable at best. Runs Oblivion well, but I suspect the CS is more of a memory-sucker than the game.

[EDIT] I also realized I had way too many details on the original heightmap and too much sharp contrast, so as much as I liked it, I kinda had to tone it back. This might also have contributed to the CS crash, though I'm still having the same problem so it's not the sole one, unfortunately.

1gb is a little low to be using the heightmap editor. You may still be able to get it working in a limited manner by stopping any background process which is not critical to making your computer run, but even at that you would probably be limited to only using the manual tools.

Speaking of background processes that aren't critical to making the computer run - you can also turn off explorer . Turn in on back again in the task manager File -> New task -> type in "explorer" and hit enter ;P.