JRT, I guess I should point out that all the beautiful objects were built
by Ben, and placed by Stickman. My part was to detail the ground for them
to sit on, which had been generic farm fields before I outlined the harbours,
breakwaters, and concrete pads. I assure you, that part of the landscaping
process is quite easy, though slow and detailed.

I generally use an image "stack" in gimp, with as many as eight layers, one
being the colour coded land use map in Rowan system, and a second being the
accompanying Rowan coded height map, the remaining layers being devoted to
whatever maps and aerial photos I can glean or beg from the web, all adjusted,
resized and often, for the aerials, perspective-corrected, to fit at the
(hopefully reasonably close to) correct size and location. Then I just trace
the details onto the land-use map, and adjust the heightmap according to topo
maps and, for large and complex regions of topography, the publicly available
height data at 30m grid spacing provided by NASA.

Having gotten all the ducks in a row, it is simply then a matter of engaging in a
long argument with the Rowan map editing tool, mtt2, to get it to accept my edited
maps and compile them into the terrain. It is always gratifying when it finally
capitulates, and I get to run up BoB2 and finally see the result of all my work
for the first time - and usually see all the ridiculous misinterpretations mtt2
has made of my height specifications, choosing absurd combinations of points for
generating the triangular facets for the the 3D surface. This then requires taking
a lot of screenies, then going back out and editing the map some more, to insert
lines which force facet edges between points. Fortunately, for the work I've
been doing around the docks, there is not much height variation, so I haven't
had to contend with that recently.