Looking for anything useful anyone has to share about terrain building.
Currently I've been playing around with the Arma 3 Tools, specifically the terrain builder. I managed to get a flat terrain into the terrain builder and was able to manage to get to the point where I could explore it with bulldozer. I also managed to get a terrain that used it's satellite map as it's height map so I could play around with some of the elevation tools and see how it looked. The biggest problem however is that a lot of the terrain tutorials I have seen people try to make are based off of real places. This seems to be because they can use various tools to help them get the satellite images and height map information they need to recreate these places easily. Following those tutorials I have a basic understanding of how it all seems to work however and instead of trying to recreate a real place, I want to create my own original place.
The biggest issue I see right now would be stitching together satellite images to create a semi-real looking area as well as finding a reliable way to make a height map. For the satellite images I think I'm just going to try my best to get small photographs / textures and stitch them together to make something. Not looking to make it pretty but just enough so that it's not too jarring and when looked at. As far as I can tell this mostly effects what people see when looking at it from a distance or from the air since when you're closer up it get's replaced by the textures specified in the mask you create (correct me if I'm wrong please!). As for the height map the only tools I've seen either create a map height off of real geographical location data or they create random height maps.
Any help anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.
Sidenote: If anyone has some useful information on some of the other Arma 3 Tools I'd be happy to learn about those as well. Eventually I'd like to try my hand at making or modifying add-ons in some sort so anything relating to those would be cool.
