Wow Mark, that's looking good.

Below is my latest test. I've been playing around alot with both Terragen and Vue. In fact, I've carefully disected one of Terragen's great grass layers and have tried my best to reproduce it in Vue using layers and the fast perlin fractal. With some luck, I think I've got it.

Also, I've developed what I think to be a good workflow between Layers and Mixed Materials. Turns out I need both. Here's how I do it. I use Layers to create a sophisticated material...like the TerraGrass one I mentioned with 5 seperate layers. I create another set of layers for the beach, the vertical surfaces, the top, the sea foam and so on. When my layers are complete, I then create a massive Mixed Materials mat which uses bright colors for each 'segment' of the mountain. So, I'll have the mountain material which is comprised of the beach (lower mountain) and upper mountain, and the beach will be a mixed material comprised of the sand and the surf. The upper mountain is a mixed material of the top of the mountain the the middle of the mountain..and so forth and so on.

Once my Mixed Material Mountain is complete (with all garish colors in place), I can then apply it on a terrain or set of terrains, and adjust until the colors are tweaked the way I like them, typically by adjusting only the mixing ratio slider. Once there, I simple replace each of the simple mixed mats with a more complicated layer mat, like my TerraGrass. It all sound complicated, but works really well and is very easy to edit and tweak.

I'll be putting together a group of 'TerraMats' along with a description on how to use them shortly.

About the image below: The terrain was created in Terragen and exported as 16-bit RAW, converted to 16-bit Tif in Pshop and then imported into Vue. I then 'hunted' for a good view, a la Terragen does. I'm using a standard atmosphere and a single 'TerraMountain' texture created per above. I'm still using the same old Shasta water with a Simple Fractal-> Water Rough applied as a bump. I've my own shoreline which still needs work. Oh, and btw, other than a map in the shore water (from SeaVue), I don't use ANY other bitmaps...this whole thing is done with procedural mapping and fractals. I have 'discovered' a few nifty fractal functions along the way, which I hope to share soon.

I've still got some work to do on some of the other textures, but it's coming along nicely I believe.