Something I want to do is to create some really harsh, jagged terrains. The sort of thing you might see on some airless planet or asteroid, for example, with razor-edged rocks and mountains. I've tried lots of different things but nothing really works the way I want; I always seem to end up with soft terrains which appear to have millions of years of erosion behind them. Anyone have any comments on the best way to do this? Is it better to do it in the terrain editor, or is the material more important (using V5I BTW)?

hm 1) heighten the terrain, scale it in Y. 2) Use lots of grit, stones, fir tree, cracks effects :)

Thanks for the reply. I've tried quite a lot of those effects, but still don't get quite the result I'm after. I'm sure it's down to the material in great part, the best I can find for this is 'burned rock and lava' in the landscapes collection, but it still tends to give a softer result than I'd like. Guess I'll have to experiment with the function editor and see what I can get :-)

Hey I have an idea... how about Plan to use a quarterof the whole screen take the terrain, and minimize the Y-axis to 1/10 X, an built layers, then copy/multiply the layers of rock like shale, the rotate around some piont on Z-axis... this could give a jagged surface in 3d sort of just an idea R

Thanks, that's an interesting idea.. I'll give it a go when I have a moment.

I would do some harsh black&white bitmaps in something like Photoshop. And use that to create the terrain. In most 2D programs you can control contrast and things like that to make your pixels as hard as you want them to.