Let's say you have a terrain which isn't flat and has a certain shader used to color it. Let's say for scenic effect you want to create another, smaller area of terrain, which will use a different shader, but will exactly match the form of the first for the area it covers. So even though it's a small area it will conform perfectly. Is this possible? I'm using Carrara 8?.

Yes. However, this will require you to adjust the blending and altitude distribution controls inside the shader tree if the vertical size of the terrain is different.

I was hoping just to lay a flat shape down and have it conform. If it's possible, is there any tutorial or thread which discusses how to do this?

 Oh, I see what you mean. No, Carrara does not have a drape/conform option.

Why conform instead of duplicate? There may be another way to get what you want.

Couldn't you export/import the original terrain and use the modeling tools to cutout/shape the mesh piece you want?

edit to point out that I have done that for droping streambeds and the water to flow with it. Also waterfalls and such.

Mark, duplicate won't work since reducing the size of the second will also reduce the size of the terrain features so they won't match up. I quess I'll try tashar's suggestion, but I was hoping for an easy conforming fix because then I could play around trying one position and then another to see where the overlay would work best..

Copy and paste gives 2 individual terrains for resizing. You can resize the second without effecting the first.

I know that, but when you resize the copy the features (ups and downs) are resized also. Maybe I'm missing something here. Let's say you have an elephant standing so that it's rear feet rest on a very small bump in the terrain at 1' high, and it's front feet rest on a very small different bump at 2' high. When you copy and resize the bumps change position as well as height, so the second layer of terrain will not conform where it needs to to keep the elephant resting on the ground properly. A cutout and copy will work but I'd have to repeat it over and over to get the exact scenic effect because I'm stupid fussy.

One way to do it is to duplicate the terrain and then use an alpha map in the shader to mask off the bulk of the second terrain you don't want to see. Also, if you blur the alpha map, the transition between the two shaders will be less noticable.

 Good one Patrick.

Thanks Patrick. Sounds more flexible. I'll give it a try this weekend.

very clever intuition Patrick, thanks for this