NativeFloridian

I also encountered a lot of dead ends trying to follow this, but I finally managed to get it done. The elevation maps you get from here http://www.mrlc.gov/viewerjs/ MicroDEM you get from here: http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem/microdem.htm Install MicroDEM with the default options. Download the NED 1/3 arc second elevation data. Make sure you uncheck land cover from your data requests. You only want elevation data. If you select too large of an area, the server will deny you. This is good, because the limit far exceeds a usable area. Remember that real cities are large, and a "region" in the game is more akin to a "city" in real life. The "city" squares of your region correspond to "neighborhoods" in a real city. The Tampa "region" I created using this is 33x27 km (each small tiles of a region is 1 sq. km), and this only includes basically the city limits on the southern end. After selecting a rectangle for download, in order to get it in GeoTIFF format and not ArcGrid, you have to modify the download request before you click the Download button. After downloading a GeoTIFF archive from the server, extract only the .TIF (which is really a DEM), and use the "Open DEM" feature of MicroDEM to access it. After the image loads, perform the following: Right click -> Display Parameter -> Elevation -> Grayscale Right click -> Legends/Marginalia -> Deselect all -> Grid -> Neither Right click -> Modify Map Area -> 1:1 view Right click -> Save image -> Bitmap type Now, finally, you have a flattened raster grayscale image with which to begin your work. If you're not comfortable with advanced image manipulation, then I'd say don't bother. Adjusting black & white points, gamma, color depth and other image manipulation tasks are necessary to produce a usable height map from a grayscale DEM. Good information about SimCity height maps here: http://www.simcitycentral.net/knowledge/simcity4/regional-customization-part-2-grayscale-heightmapping/ I'll soon be uploading the Tampa region I created with this. Good luck.