Thanks a lot TwistedBolt! A lot of good information here and links to others. I'm using Bryce because it has the ability to do object masks and heightfields. Not to mention a great terain modeler and scatter tools to spread around those grass sprites you mentioned. I'm trying to do dds textures which are basically compressed png files with some other things added such as the distance blur you see in WoW. You can check out a lot of game texture tools at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html