Hello, 
I am very new to Vue about a week and I have been playing around in it and reading/following all the tutes I could. I have made some scenes I thought were pleasing considering my inexperience. I have been working mainly with the Ecosystem editor and predone trees and terrain textures that i fiddled with a little bit. I still don't know how to make a realistic terrain as i am used to real time 3d terrain modeling wich makes life a thousand times easyer. With time I will get there though.

So far my biggest problem was getting the textures of the ground to look realistic, from what I know you can only combine 2 materials to put on a single terrain and these materials are very limited on where they go in the terrain. I can set them for altitude, slope, and direction. Pretty good for a general "base" texture but what if I want a specific area to be a deadish swampy looking area and the rest around it to be grasslands and have a mountain in the distance with a lightly wooded but dry earth terrain. That would require at least 3 material sets on one terrain, placed in specific spots. Is there any way this can be done? It seems like in the screenshots I see they achieve this but maybe it is by other means.

Also bodies of water. It seems there is no easy way to make a nice river or a lake. I figured out I could create a plane and resize it to fit just where I want it and then add a water texture to it and walla. Works ok but can be tedious moving the plane and then opening the terrain editor and guessing where my river is and fixing the terrain to work with it. Then if there is a bend in the river you need to make a new plane so the water bodies don't match. I have not explored how to change a wave direction or amplitude yet because from what I know now it is just to hard for me to make a realistic river bed.  I have searched for tutorials on making rivers etc but it seems it is not an issue for anyone.  

I will attach an image to show you what exactly I want in the terrain. I was looking for a gold look on the ground to simulate falling leaves but still have some muddy and grimy places because the trees still looked very full and had not droped enough leaves to completely cover the ground. 

There are some great texture tutorials at GeekatPlay (http://geekatplay.com/index.php) plus they have some great beginners tutorials that will help you out.

For purchase, I highly recommend TerraPak (http://www.altuit.com/webs/hemingway/AltuitCover/default.htm).  These are materials that will not only look great, but help you create your own manterials once you read the included documentation. 

For water look at Monsoon's materials and Chipp, on the Altuit website has a water tutorial using Monsoon's materials. Monsson's can be purchased at 3D Commune. You can accomplish what you want, but it takes experience and you have to give yourself time to learn how to do it. I second Peggy's recommendation for the Geekatplay tutorials. You have great ideas, but you need to walk before you can run. Just keep those ideas going and learn how to build up to them. 

With layers you can combine many materials on a single terrain. I very often use 1 terrain for my whole scene and have many different areas on it vertically. This is aside from ecosystems. In Terrapack, Chipp has included documentation and materials for multilayered terrain.

Geekatplay has a tute for an island where they have it separated into four sections horizontally and each is different.

Good luck.

Thanks for the replys. I do find I try and jump into things that are over my head with these kinds of things. Sometimes it provides good challeneg sometimes it just gets me frusterated. 

I discovered Geekatplay yesterday and have followed some of the tutorials I thought applied to my ambitions the most. I found a great set of tutes on the function editor as well so I have learned a lot today. In the making of terrain and textures area but I am still struggling with getting a brown patch/es to show up in snow. Like you said it just takes patience, time, and experience. 

I have used layers to add 2 materials per terrain I just figured out how to add more(felt like an idiot) so that will give me much more diversity and options. I will definatly be checking out those products you mentioned. This scene here I was trying to recreate the turning leaves of aspens in the fall. They create a nice gold that I caputred well in here but I could not create an aspen tree, even in the editor. it requires new leaves and things I don't have. Thats for another time though. 

I will explore more of what G@P has to offer tonight and maybe get a terrain I can work with. Thats the hardest part so far, is getting a terrain that looks realistic.

Anyways enough of my ranting about my problems, I thank you for your input and help.

Regarding realistic terrains, I assume you are talking about the general shape of it, not the texture. I find Vue terrains not very realistic. That's why I purchased GeoControl. Not very expensive (59 euros). That tool generates the most incredible terrains. And the new version they have now in Beta is just fantastic. If you take a look at my gallery, almost all my terrains in the last few months are made with Geocontrol.

http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/geocontrol.htm
Another thing I do often with terrains inside Vue is create several. Instead of having one scene with just one big terrain, it's much more flexible to have several terrains. It becomes much more flexible if you want to adjust things later for optimum look (and, believe me, you will want to adjust things a lot...). For example, to create rivers and valeys with Vue standard terrains, the best is to create several normal terrains and play with them like Lego until they fit just right.

Have fun! :-)

One more thing. I noticed the texture of your tree is not very good. I know it's a Vue's default tree but there are new textures for these.  David Burdick created some great textures.
Here's a link to a Cornucopia forum (great site for Vue'ers) where David explains the problem and kindly provides great textures.

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5265

Rutra is exactly right in what he says. Also about GeoControl. I don't know if you want to do too many new things at once, but it is a terrific product. I have used GeoControl1 and GeoControl2 since the beginning. Cajomi has a great discussion on how to bring it into Vue as a procedural terrain. It does make the terrains very life-like. As far as I'm concerned, it's a must to have along side of Vue. While I do use one terrain often, I do use multiple ones, especially if I want to bring in rivers. It's so much easier to work with more when you are working with water.

While you can create your own trees, either through creating new leave groups with the veg plants or building new models, I suggest that learning Vue is enough. There are great trees at Cornucopia 3D. I'm not sure if I saw any Aspens. I have been using Aspen from the xfrog Billboards when I need them. But I did get a notice from Linda of Incredibly Lush Plants (Cornucopia 3D) that she will be coming out shortly with a series that will contain trees from the western region. There might be others out there. 

As a note: I was referring to Rutra's first post. This one came in after I wrote mine, but I'm glad he pointed you to David's textures. David also provided a file to download with all his new textures in them.

You

As a note: I was referring to Rutra's first post. This one came in after I wrote mine, but I'm glad he pointed you to David's textures. David also provided a file to download with all his new textures in them.

You might also want to join the forum at Geekatplay. It's small, but people are great there in helping each other, also.

In next week we(G@P) will have new free video tutorials series comming out "epic landscapes"  it may help also to create realistic landscapes, here is couple images from tutorials:

Wow, I can't wait. I did the 3d Ecosystems tutorial today and decided to explore it more on my own by creating a sort of rockslide off of a mountain. So I got my "slide" down pretty good and then in the end I could not change the material of the rock. If I did try and change it it would either delete my cube(that the rocks are in), or texture the cube. Is there a way I can keep the the cube transparent and change the material on the rocks? I have tried adding layers, moving the layers, etc tec. can't seem to find the way.  If worst comes to worst i can make the "Chipped" material work but it really dosent show up well enough over the dry brown landscape it is supposed to be one.

You can change the material of the elements of an ecosystem easily. See attached image. In the bottom area of the object browser on the right of Vue screen, you have 4 tabs. The second tab, with 4 little spheres, has the list of all materials. Some of them are ecosystem ones. Just double click on the one you want to change... and change it.

Oh duh, I knew that :P Thanks for the help, sent me on my way.

You are saying, you believe it's only possible, to only combine two materials on a terrain.

There are so many possibilities in the advanced material editor ...

That's just the start of a terrain texture in Vue. Depending on the scenery you are going for, this is sometimes really enough, to show plenty of variety, if you are adding and use the extra options for terrain material influence. Like slope, height, direction settings - using a variable density and positioning through a filter, function or greyscale bitmap driven placement - hard edges, flowing edges between the materials - variable colors again controled by filter, function, greyscale bitmaps - or use of displacement - or change the surface in details and shape by using hyper-textures and, and, and ....

And - the two combined start materials are just the 'start' of your material line. Each of those two start materials can be edited separate from each other and make out of each of them again mixed materials adding in each deeper hierarchy step more materials, which can be controlled with the above mentioned methods to make up really extrem detailed and influenced terrain textures.

There is even more - each material can be made out of multi-layers

The possibilities to create very complex terrain materials are all there - they just have to be activated and put to good use. Sure this will take quite some time in handling and understanding how it ticks, but each program got it's learning curve and in my opinion with Vue i've had the easiest start compared with other 3D graphic programs i have tried before. And - i still don't use Vue by far not to it's fullest potential - even after 2 years of use.

By the way - you could double your terrain - and on this second terrain you could add an eco with just a leaf as an object and cover that ground, fully, driven by slope, heigth or a bitmap driven variable density or paint them on the terrain - or whatever - many, many options.
After the eco leafes are all covering this second terrain, go into this 'underlying' terrain and turn the transparancy to 100%, so the second terrain is invisible and the only thing that's left are the eco leafes. Now the first terrain with your mixed ground texture will be covered with nice leafes, because they are separate objects and they are fitting exactly the first terrain shape, like in a real forest, too ....

Thanks for the tips. I didn't mean to say it wasint possible, I just don't know how. I have learned a lot in the past few days regarding textures and how it works. I will explore it even more once I finish my 3d ecosystem study scene. I have gotten to a point of very basic undertsnading of the funtion editor but im going to need to make myself some sort of cheat sheet to tell me what each node and funtion does so it sticks in my brain. otherwise whatever I do is a "Calculated fkup"

Unfortunatly I can not work on the above scene anymore because I never saved it. It was my first personal render and nothing I was extremly excited about. I see all of these addons out there but i think I want to get a better handle on the program before I dive into outside programs to learn.