Yeah, I know what you mean about the exaggeration, I've seen it done a few times by various companies but haven't been too fond of it myself, sometimes it's really necessary but other times it just ends up way overblown. As for the importing, I've found that sometimes it's vastly overscaled and in the case of my mt. st. helens one is actually underscaled, but my mt. st. helens one is also the full res 8000 pixels square (plus or minus) chunk that's available for that area (no scaling down at all), so it has a large variation in the terrain elevations. Just thought I'd share a render I'd done using the 3 meter MSH terrain (split into chunks) showing the texturing and in particular how this allows ecosystems to be applied in limited use to a large scale dem (by applying it only to the foreground quadrant, which allows much tighter and manageable control of system resources. Thanks for all the links and tutorials, it's nice to know there's multiple possibilities should one method not work (which we all know happens more than we'd like).