Does anyone have any experience doing this, by any chance?
I've tried all different maps and file types, when I try to import into Mgen I get "Could not Import map"
and 0x0 cells is what the render window shows afterwards.
Also, the select file for import option can't find my files through browsing ( they aren't shown ). I have to type in the file name, then it finds it.

thanx

Don't use Mgen, its not very user friendly, is extremely buggy (didn't make it past alpha stage), and I don't reccomend anyone uses it. I figured out how to get it going, the first thing i'd suggest is to try loading the map file from the mgen directory

I gave up on it eventually, and Lightwave made me a program made specifically for importing heightmaps into an .esp.

Its called TESAnnwyn (LINK), and will import a RAW or BMP (Greyscale) into an .esp. Its a command line utility, it requires a little knowledge in that area, but everything is detailed in the readme, make sure you read it.

Great, thanks.
Just being able to import is pretty good for now.

The Mgen rules for placing objects looked interesting, but I'd always wondered about how good they were since the author posted a screenshot with a bush sticking out of the side of a 45 degree slope.

http://www.andargor.com/img/cs3.jpg

Would be cool if I could just make a 200x200 cell map with all the landscape randomized, and have it look good...
Especially since proper random generation looks better and more natural than "by hand", that's why fractal maps and terragen work as well as they do.

This is something I'd definitely work on if I had a clue about creating programs.

The rules thing is quite annoying, especially because of the bugs, the hard part I found was setting the statics to sit at the right height on the terrain.

Terragen and Fractal maps don't do that good a job of making it look natural, you can make a realistic heightmap without the use of generators if you know what you're doing. I make my heightmaps by hand, in paintshop pro (similar to photoshop), and they usually come out looking a lot better than boring random terrain. Heres a recent one ~ LINK

I'd reccomend looking at Geocontrol, it will create randomised landscapes, and give you some nice erosion effects to make it look more real.

Wow, impressive pics.

I read you're planning to place the Skyrim statics with oblivion generation, that's more what I meant with random generation. It would be great if you could tell me which utilities are needed for generation and export.

thanks

None yet, we have to make them. Lightwave may be able to build it into TEStroi or TESannwyn, i'm not sure, i'll let you know if we are able to do it.

Basically we'll import the heightmap into Oblivion, along with a bunch of custom statics, do the generation, then convert the landmass + static placement back over to TES3 319 format.

i'm trying to make a heightmap using GIMP but i can't get it to take the colours as height values, any ideas on how to stop it taking them as RGB?