Hi there Morcrist,
I think the terrain stuff is too involved for most people to manage and its also a huge headache to have gigabytes of the terrain data spread out over many machines. But what we are looking for is some 3D models of interesting places in Middle Earth. There is a list of the places that we would like to make up - link at the end.
What would be really really useful right now is a model of each one of those in extremely rough detail. I.e. just boxes, cones, cylinders and whatever else is really easy to knock up in a few minutes. But that these models should just be about the right scale and take up an approximately right amount of area on the map.
We should be able to import them into outerra and fly around and see a spike where Isengard would be for example.
What Monks and I need to do a bit later is refine the terrain around those places to make sure that the models fit onto that base correctly before we put a more refined 3D building on top.
So the only challenge to that job is that you might need to investigate the shapes of those places by using the book descriptions, or taking notes from artwork produced over the years by people or by referencing the existing or accepted consensus of the worlds opinion on what the book said was there.
Whilst the recent films are one such source to look at, it was only one interpretation and tho a reasonably good one for many of the places (at least I thought so....) the books should be the final arbiter. Thats why I think we need the rough models so people can point out the references before too much effort has gone into them if they need to be adjusted.
For the 3D format then I like OBJ since its all text and thus very portable but outerra is using a COLLADA variant format I believe so google sketchup files should be compatible with them. I am sure SKU are just zipped COLLADA format. But if you want to run with some specific format other than those then so long as its convertible then I think it should be fine. Using Blender should mean that you can convert any model to its list of exports and OBJ and COLLADA are amongst them.
Hope that helps. I think both Monks and I are about 3 - 4 weeks away from being freed up enough to do a beta rerun of the biomes again and then were on to the building areas.
P.S. Place list is here:
http://worlds.outercraft.com/forum/index.php/topic,7.msg11.html#msg11Just create a thread per new model place and people can comment or pick up the baton and refine it a bit more.
