Manually created Height Maps?

[Alpha17x]

Hi all, I've been going through the documentation for UE3/UDK and I've searched these forums, google, and youtube but so far I've been unable to locate quite what I'm looking for;

I'm trying to make a 'world map' for an rpg, with all the towns, etc on it, I know how to use the terrain tools in UDK to detail an area, and I know how to import a height map, but I don't want to
randomly generate a height map and then import it. I want continents and islands in specific places, then flood it with some ocean and I can fine tune everything after that.

Is there a tool where I can manually paint out the islands and continents inside UDK ? Is there a way to for example; bring up a full topographical view of the entire level carve out the land that
way? I'll keep looking.

If anyone has used Cry Engine 3, I'm basically looking for something similar to how you sort of 'paint the land' into being that they have. If UDK has a similar or at least equally useful method of
world building I'm interested in knowing what it is.

[Cuplacakes]

You can use Photoshop or another similar program. You can then save that as a .raw file and import. Mind you, it takes a bit of practice to get it realistic looking. The height can be changed easily in the udk by going into its properties and changing its scale in the z direction. To create a really bsic material for the landscape, you can create a texture in the same program that would like an Ariel photo of the whole area. Import that as a texture, then in the material editor of the udk create a terrainlayercoord node, and set the scale to the resolution of the .raw terrain file. I prefer doing this tobworking with the default udk texture as it fives you. Better idea of what the final product will look like.
Apolagies for a somewhat garbled messge, i am currently on a phone

Cheers.
George.