"getting the ground near the camera to look like it was dragged under something before it was used." Hate that :o( you could experiment, doing things like placing a rock with the same texture in the foreground, but looking like a bump in the terrain. covered with the same mat, you could increase the frequency of the mat so it looked convincing? Attached is a quick'n'dirty example. The left part of the image is how it looked with just one terrain, at default resolution setting (in the terrain editor). The right part of the image, I duplicated the terrain, scaled it down a lot, applied a different material (bright blue) so I could identify it's position in the small preview window), got it positioned where I wanted it (close to the camera, and slanting slightly away). Then I went back into the terrain editor and increased the resolution to 512x512, then went into the texture editor, applied the same texture as on the other terrain (new mexico cliffs), and increased the frequency of the material from 12% to 60%. I'll post another screenshot of where you can find the terrain and texture settings to mess with :o)