Does SC2 have any terrain system like picture mapper back in SC1? I have a picture of the terrain I want, and it's even colored by elevation, is there something that I can put this image into and tell it what values to assign the colors yet, or do I have to beg farty?

It would be amazing if you could just paint your terrain in a program and import it, and then assign the colors in your paint to different textures and elevations. I know this is possible, but I don't have near the programming capability to do so. Who wants to stand up to this task? Anyone who could create such a thing would no doubt be rewarded somehow (lots and lots of minerals maybe?).

I think Farty actually made one for SC2 (I know someone did), though I'm not sure where it is.

He made something that could create texture masks. I'd say that's not what you want. Of you want to affect the terrain as a whole, you can edit the height map by going into the map's MPQ. Check the wiki for info on MPQ editing. It doesn't have specifics on height map editing yet though. Also, that doesn't change the map textures. If you just want a particular picture as your minimap, that's easy enough to do, let me know if that's all you wanted.

What I wanted was...

http://www.glyphweb.com/ARDA/m/middleearth.html

...using a map similar to the one linked above, to be able to be place said map into a program which could be imported into the game and give the map editor set variables on what the elevation should be determined by the color marking on the map ( blue = 0 (water), green = 1(lowlands), light green = 2(plains), light light green = 3 (rolling hills), light grey = 4 (steppes), grey = 5 (mountainous hills and valleys), dark grey =6 (continious upward mountainous slope), white = 7(mountain peaks)). Depending on how it's made, dark green could be used to tell the program to put tree doodads in that location to make easy to create forest.

This is simplified of course. Most paint programs have 256 variables each for red, green, and blue. Ideally, 255red, green, and blue, would give you a slightly different texture than 255 red and blue, and 254 green. It would make terraining as easy as combining colours and make it easy to give the entire landscape some differentiation without having to go over each little detail yourself in the map editor trying make it seem more natural. Hue and opacity could alternatively be used to give the map editor set variables of height so that you could easily tell it which areas you wanted mountainous or cliffed just by using your paint program and importing it.

That's the idea at least, I'd be happy with just the 8 variables of height to get me started and fill in the details myself, but the potential is there to make it more than that.

Ideally this would come with a way to give it distances as well (the map above has a distance chart), in such a way that if my map is 256x256, it would break whatever picture I import into it into 256x256 sections, and raise the elevation in each section according to the coloring scheme.

I dont' know any other way to do this yet other than making 256 lines vertically and horizontally across the map I want to use and trying to match each one up with the editors build in grid system. Still need to check your suggested wiki page mind you.

I did, and I was planning one for editing terrain height .. the problem was that using a simple greyscale image only has a maximum depth of 256 values, but the sc2 heightmap has a depth of 65536 values. I could use a 16-bit greyscale image for that ... but I have no idea how to (or if you even can) edit one.

I'd like to see a program just like starcraft picture mapper except for sc2 instead of sc1.

I know that you can place an actual picture as the mini-map, but if I was to do that I would want the person to actually see the picture drawn into the terrain itself... it's just so much cooler looking... and with starcraft 2's ability to import colors for terrain and to not need to make perfect squares with those colors... unlike in sc1 where the pictures would turn out with jagged edges and somewhat blocky it would be cool to see it map a picture perfectly right onto the map.

SC2: DaKy.833

Lemme know if anything comes around like this

*stares at farty*