Terrain-Sculpting. There is no other more hated word in my vocabulary right now. Terrain Sculpting is really a pain-in-the-arse. I've found that the CAW tools are miserably imprecise and much too small for sculpting large worlds. I would prefer to edit the height maps in Photoshop, but I haven't quite gotten the hang of it. As with roads, it seems that the only advice other designers can offer is to try it out yourself.
Right now, I am most perplexed by the gradients of grayscale in the height maps. I wish there was some comprehensive list of what all the values of gray equate to in terms of elevation. However, I recognize that this is likely an outrageous request. I do know, however, that the blackest black #000000 represents the sea floor and white #ffffff is used for the highest elevation.
I am currently in the process of using deathoflight's marvelous mountain brushes in photoshop to help form the hills to the north. More to come later...
Update: I've found some inspiration after looking at images of landscapes. Now, the battle to translate it into terrain-sculpting...
Update: 19 December: Finally, I was able to terraform something that I actually like. I looked at dozens of photographs but what was really useful to me was a hand sketch.
From that, I was able to form the mountain and plateau on which the villas will sit, overlooking the city. I'm not entirely satisfied with the mountain. I think it looks too busy. However, I'm planning to sculpt the rolling hills for the vineyards and I'll go back and tweak and paint everything.
Terrain-sculpting is really tiring. I sculpted, imported into photoshop, exported, tweaked, and leveled hours of work continually until I could make heads or tails of the CAW terrain. I also got my head around the grayscale in photoshop. Will post more details after I've sculpted the rest of the world (hopefully sometime this year - really, so tiring).
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