Oh, particularly interested in following this one. I am not sure if I will have time to do one but id like to have a go this month or two and the set of criteria you have chosen is similar to what I wanted only I think my map would be pretty large scale - maybe a handful of houses. I have in mind an italian villa... anyway, its interesting to see how you get your height map. USGS do a lot of height maps of the earth as do NASA and a load of other places. Its nice that the USA have a free use policy on government data. I havent ported my dragon flight app to linux yet. I should do that soon really. Its a simple real time 3D viewer. For Mouse if your on windows I could shoot you a copy to try. It used to be a free download but I need to find a home online for it. I also did a tut for creating height maps from arbitrary maps and it only used an image editor but the results wont be as good as Vue or something scanned like USGS height map info.

Also, its a little early in the process for me to say which one of the two maps you posted I think look the best. Either could be depending on where its going from here. But do post some notes about how your going about it as I am curious. I had never heard of Terrain Party or 3D Coat.