Hey one and all!

This is my first post on Renderosity and I am hoping that I can get the help I need here. I have been into digital art for a while but still consider myself a beginner and I have played around with 3d lanscaping programs like Terragen and Vue 5 Infinite which I love.

Now my problem is this, as much as I love both the above programs I find it hard to get the level of control that I need over either app when it comes to the terrain generation and was wondering if there was something that I was missing. So if any of  you out there are into this  kind of stuff  can you let me know what apps you use  to get the  type of terrains that I just look at and go  "how the  hell did he/she do that?"  or are there any good tutorials out there for beginners  on actual terrain and scene creation.

I only do still images so animation is not an issue in anyway.

THANks a million in advance,
Ionize

There are some good tutorials. One of the best is the "Procedural Terrain Tutorial" for Vue 5i, in the store (not free) at Cornucopia 3D. It shows how to approach the Vue Terrain Editor through the Function Editor (not for the faint of heart, but does what you asked).

This allows controlling a whole set of materials for one terrain, all the way from a mountain top to the bottom of a lake and everything in between. The demo uses the terrain itself to drive the mapping of the materials - a very powerful method!

The tutorial also shows ho to make materials that look equally good in the foreground, middle distance and on a distant mountain - something that is often lacking.

It demonstrates many labor and time saving tricks, such as using bright colors in place of your actual materials, so you can see exactly what's going on and also do fast test renders - then switch over to the real textures at the end. It runs inside the Vue 5i help system.

If you find any great tutorials, please suggest them for the community, at my directory of Vue web tutorials:

_jc  'Art Head Start' e-book: Learn digital art skills $19.95
'Art Head Start.com Free chapter, Vue tutorials, models, Web Tutorials Directory.

This guy's got some fairly firm control on his terrains... here's one of 2 free tutorials he posted.

http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/vuelab/TerrainMapping.htm

Jim is right, there's a good terrain tutorial (2) on those CDs.

Right, FuzzyVision, that's Chipp Walter's site. He makes a nice terrain profiling tool as well, called AltTerrain Builder. You can check it out at that same site above. 

The tutorials i was talking about are downloads you run inside Vue's Help, not CDs.
Might be others on CD, i dunno. The full name is 'Procedural Terrains - A to Z' and they are by the famous Vue artist Robert Czarny. $19.95.

There is also a free 'Young Mountains' tutorial by the also famous Vue animator, Philippe Bouyer - he did many of the e-on marketing animations.

Thanks a million guys,

Right now I will admit that I am looking for free stuff till my wages settle in my new job and then I can go out and start buying the things (",)

Until then I will have a look around the web and see what I can come up with, and needless to say I will let the community if I find some nice nuggets out there heehee

Thanks again guys,
Ionize

See if this helps...video tute (FREE) on working with terrains etc.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=369883