Guide: How to create high quality grayscale heightmaps for Cities: Skylines 2 | Qgis | Map Making

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Published 2024-04-12

This tutorial teaches you, how you can make your own high quality heightmaps, in much greater details, than any online downloader can achieve. The example uses 2 m map resolution. It is important to find good, local sources for your maps. Links to a couple of sources, further down.

Q&A

Q: What's the lowest resolution you would recommend using?
A: Min. 5 meter resolution, so 5 meter or less (lower is better) for Cities: Skylines 2. If your files are in arc minutes, use this site to calculate what the resolution is in meters: www.opendem.info/arc2meters.html

Q: How do I see the elevation of a given point, on a map?
A: Install the plugin, called "Value Tool. You can see it working in my video, when I'm on the front-page of QGIS. It's the lower window, in the right side. It only works on DEM data, not maps, like Google Maps, unless there's a DEM file on top, or below the geographic map. Values are in meters.

Map sources:
Iceland 2m resolution - atlas.lmi.is/mapview/?application=DEM
Discord server discord.gg/edxQkTz2

HARDWARE (I KNOW SOMEONE WILL ASK)
Asus B650-Plus WIFI
AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900 Gaming Processor
Gigabyte RTX 3060 12 GB
64GB G.Skill Trident DDR5-5600 CL30
Soundblaster Z
Altec Lansing speakers 5.1 (forgot the model name)
Asus PB277Q 27" monitor
Samsung 24" (+15 years old, forgot the model nuimber)
Steelseries Apex 7 keyboard
Steelseries Rival 300 mouse
~30TB of harddisk space

00:00 Introduction
00:21 Tools You Will Need
00:49 Our Goal
02:10 Getting Started
02:57 Setting Up Qgis
04:19 Downloading the World
05:38 Finding an Area of Interest
06:56 Downloading the First Map Data
11:17 Setting the Project Reference System (CRS)
14:26 Setting Up a Print Layout and Adding the Map layer
18:13 Adding Guidelines to Your Map
32:14 Adding the Local Map
39:00 Downloading Additional Map Data
45:32 Generating the Two Maps to Prepare for Export
49:19 Evaluating and Exporting the Heightmaps
58:26 Wrap-up
59:06 Addendum - Exporting an Image overlay
1:03:00 Rolling Credits

All Comments (3)

@brandonhenrickson576 1 month ago

I've been looking for this exact tutorial for so long. Thank you, this was extremely helpful
@manollobango 1 month ago

Hello, first of all, thank you for pointing out your tutorial! 😃 It is very informative and helpful as it has helped me understand how to create maps with QGIS now. But I'm wondering if the scales of the imported maps match the in-game scales of the assets like roads etc. Can you tell?