Continent Tutorial

[swotavator]

Hey all, I have been messing around with the tutorials and have had some progress piecing together nice shots.  I was inspired by a project I saw, recently:
http://www.darkelf.ca/

This guy used Photoshop and Terragen to put together a HUGE heightmap of Middle Earth.  I am interested in doing the same for Britannia from Ultima.  The tutorials I have seen are mainly based on reproducting a certain type of feature.  Can anyone point me towards a resource where I might learn how to recreate a continent of an already known shape?
Any ideas where to start?   Thanks

[Oshyan]

http://www.me-dem.org

- Oshyan

[swotavator]

woot! this is a lot of stuff to dig through.  Good deal, never heard of L3DT.  So is it true most people tend to use terragen for the rendering?

[Oshyan]

Terragen 2 does have great procedural terrain tools, but when it comes to creating specific terrain shapes, it's not as well-suited for the task. Dedicated heightfield modelers like Leveller, World Machine, L3DT, Geocontrol, and Wilbur are better. When it comes to rendering, however, Terragen is your best bet.

- Oshyan

[TheBlackHole]

Here's a quick tut:
Start in Photoshop.
Fill the entire image with black.
Using the Lasso (?) tool, draw your continent.
Fill it with: Red 1, Green 1, Blue 1.
Don't worry if you can't see it, the computer can.
This creates your coastline, now paint in the following:
Black for lakes
Dark gray for deserts and plains
Medium gray for highlands or forests
Light gray for plateaus
White for mountains
Then, make a new layer and fill with clouds.
Set the opacity to a very low value. This will provide some detail.
Congrats, you're done!
Now just save as some image file and convert it to a heightfield using a program of some sort!