I use Photoshop exclusively to edit heightmaps. The next part of this tutorial relies on Adobe Photoshop. Give your exported area a name, and voila! Move the blue box to the part of the world your want (I am using Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California), resize it to encompass the amount of terrain you want, and click on the Export button. The terrian.party tools are fairly straightforward to use. Fortunately, modders for the game Cities: Skylines have created a perfect tool for this purpose. To get a real-world location into Skyrim, we have to start with some satellite imagery converted into a grayscale heightmap. Once your heightmap is finished, you have to lower the values into the range that Skyrim can handle. Most importantly, Skyrim can’t handle extremes in height changes. Skyrim (and Oblivion before it) have very particular requirements for a heightmap to work correctly. To create a Skyrim-compatible heightmap, I used this fabulous tutorial. In light of this, I thought I’d put up a tutorial on how I got a real-world heightmap into Skyrim. Again, back up your files! This means I get to start over from scratch.
