Thanks for all the nice comments.

Mark, I know what you mean about how addictive this stuff can be! I wish I could call in sick today too!  Is the AisleFX DVD any good? I purchased the last 'advanced' version and it was the worst 100 bucks I've ever spent. Nothing advanced in the whole set, and IMO not very professional. I tried contacting them about it but they wouldn't get back to me. Bummer. Let me know how they work for you.

The real trick in all of this is to figure out how to create textures which scale well. They need to look good up close and also good from a distance. That's the tough part. See how TG does it, they have a great fractal model-- sadly there's not a similar one that I can figure out in Vue. I have found a couple of functions which do have some value, but still aren't quite what TG has.

Also, TG's terrains rock. Their default terrain has nice mountains PLUS it has a natural slope down to the water, which is IMO difficult to do in Vue. Vue's terrain editor could use a bit of help by just looking how easy it is to create terrains in TG. Don't get me wrong, rendering in TG is tedious at best, but they do some things very well...especially their handling of material layers. Their notion of child layers is similar to mixed materials and layers, but easier to use and IMO understand.

agiel, I'm not sure about the grass being too uniform, but I'll take a crack at making a more splotchy version. I think the grass works better up close than in the distance...perhaps needs a bit of a tweak there. Grass is the hardest. I agree, the green is perhaps too green. Fact is I've already unsaturated it once from the original values as set in TG...maybe need to try again. Perhaps a bit more 'yellow' on the slopes.

The sand could be softer, but IMO the detail in it helps. I need to have a variety of tweaked MATS that can be loaded interchangeably.