Request: Comprehensive Terrain Tutorial

The last game I did any mapping for was C&C Renegade, which used Gmax for model and terrain creation. In that game terrain was easy (for me), setting up the level to work bug free was the hard part.
Hammer seems to be the opposite. Setting things up is relatively easy, while getting any form of realistic (as in not cubular) terrain is rather difficult.
All the tutorials I have found show you how to create a displacement surface, and how to adjust the points on it, they don't go into very much detail on the actual practice of making it look like natural land forms.

Are there any comprehensive tutorials out there?

 

What hammer uses is more or less direct vertex manipulation with an excessively complicated interface.

To make it look good, you move the vertices of your displacement until it looks good, there isn't any other way to put it.

 

It takes MASSIVE ammounts of time, patience, trial and error, and texture manipulation. It just plain sucks.

 

Or you can cheat like me, I made one displacement and copied it all over the place, then sewed the bits together.

Then I negatively scaled it, rotated it 90 degrees, and pasted it over to the other side of the map.

 

Bullshit, takes no more than a couple of hours to do it good. though it does take some patience to get it right, the texturing and brush placement is the hard part.

This is an example done by our very own R_Yell, shows you the more advanced way of doing it:
http://www.interlopers.net/index.php?page=tutorials&id=4597

Or you can make a black-and-white heightmap in Photoshop or gimp and generate a vmf out of that with Cannonfodders dispgen terrain generator tool.

http://chaosincarnate.net/cannonfodder/cftools.htm

 

Neither of those are very good for terrain in source. If it was an RTS game with only a heightmap to work with then sure, but source can and should use displacements on more than one plane, you can put a displacement on any surface, and they invariably look better if you use vertical displacements for vertical terrain.

 

I dunno, R_Yell used the earlier technique and made Mvalley which is pretty good looking.

 

Yeah, I know, and I don't like mvalley, or slaughtered.

They are OK looking, but mvalley in particular would look much better with proper cliffs.

 

Threw the interlopers link I found http://www.interlopers.net/index.php?page=tutorials&id=16891 which is much closer to what I was looking for then what I had found up until that point.