Is there anyway to import terrain from external builders? one of my compatriots on this project uses world machine, and really wants to be able to import into the world editor after hes done. All I've seen in the editor is importing from pictures?

I suppose you could export the terrain as a heightmap inside of World Machine or export it as mesh and set it to "Embed into Terrain" inside of WE. Never used World Machine before though.

Alrighty, well the terrain import from png is actually doing fairly well, I've been testing and tweaking and doing all that good stuff, but one thing I'm having trouble with, is the size of the import, the size of what I've built elsewhere and I'm trying to import, is coming in at about 1/5 the size I need it to be. IE, 6x6 tiles is what its coming in as, and I need it to come in at roughly 5 times that >< I've got lots of terrain coming in all with erosion effects etc, and its importing it very precisely from the png, I like how its doing it, the heightmap translation seems to be very precise, I just need it to come in at the size I built it in world machine, as Opposed to this little tiny import.

Area size is 64x64 with path size of 64, I've tried larger and smaller, doesnt seem to make a difference.

I believe all you need to do is just change the X and Z values on the Import Heightmap menu to 25 instead of 5.

Thanks >< sometimes I amaze myself with missing the obvious

Hehe, no problem.. we all do that from time to time.

Alright, since you've been ever so helpful
I've got the entire large piece of terrain setup and ready to render, but its going to render it into tiles, which works out for a total of 4096 tiles >< so not only is it going to take forever to render into png's, which I dont overly mind, since its doing it at .61 meter per pixel.
But its going to take forever to load into the esenthel editor, is there anyway to load multiple tiles at once? So I dont have to change coords and load all 4096 tile heightmaps in one at a time?

I'm not sure, but I doubt it. Your terrain seems like it is going to be extremely large. How big is each heightmap? 1024x1024? If you want your terrain to be that large, I think you are headed towards a road filled with pain and suffering. I would try to get the number of tiles waaayyy down, as small as possible, especially if you have to import each one individually and adjust the positioning each time, which I think you do. Perhaps you should suggest loading multiple tiles under the Feature Requests. Good luck.

hm, well the problem is of course, If I had the ram to do it, I could render it all as one giant chunk, but it takes an ungodly amount of ram to do that(32 gigs or so), so I have to tile it, and while I do have quite a bit of terrain, most of it is not actually going to be usable, but it is going to be visible to the player, so thats why I have so much of it. I'm thinking the best I could do would be a macro of some sort to automatically add in the correct amount of offset for the next tile.

I could go with quite a few less tiles, but that means I lose resolution on the heightmap, .61 meters per pixel is 4096 tiles, with 1.03 or so being 1600, I can go even less, but I dont want to lose too much resolution on the height maps, see what I'm getting at? If you have some suggestions, or if you think I can get away with maybe 3-4 meters per pixel, let me know.

Anyway, while only about 35% of what I'm importing will be playable, due to the nature of it being a river delta(so no blocking mountains to limit view distances) and with the player at several points being on a helicopter..... I kinda have to do this much terrain.
And I'm not sure what size I'm going to bring it into esenthel editor in, It by design, is much larger in the world machine editor than the end result will be, so I will be cutting down the size considerably, Ie each tile in world machine may be as little as 2x2 or as much as 10x10 in esenthel, I have to experiment.

I work terrain quite a bit and there are a couple of things you can consider. How about trying to use different resolutions to save some memory? In my fantasy RPG I find that the normal walking surfaces can be lower quality as most of it is covered by grass and vegetation. But the mountains look much better at higher resolutions. I don't know about World Maching but Grome will actually let you work in different resolutions within the program. I am not saying that you need another terrain editor-only pointing out that diferent resolutions within the same map is becoming popular.

Just a thought.
Chaplain