How to make good looking terrain?

Not sure if this is the best place to ask this question, but you guys specialize in making great terrain, so you may have some ideas how a complete n00b can start out.

If you have a link to a training tutorial, that would be great.

Sorry if this question has been asked before.

Well, you can't really "learn" how to terrain, it just comes to you.

I'm not the best terrainer myself, but possibly I can help you. For one, always use enough doodads to make your screens look natural. You can NOT make good terrain without using them. Just don't overdo it by putting 3000 doodads in one small area. Try to make your map look natural. Like if you went outside and were to terrain what your area would look like in the WC3 Engine.

All I can say is practice a lot and it should eventually come to you.

Your title hardly inspires confidence. :ggani:

Keep the tips coming. I have tried playing around with it, but it takes amazingly long time to do the most ugly terrain spawned by human hands. :////

post some of the terrian you've done..and we'll crit it and tell you how to improve it

Use as many different terrain tileset you can and use them always the same way...(that is something i think make good terrain)

ex: if I use the ashenvale tileset, i will always use leaves and lumpy grass under trees. like for road, i will use dirt and heavy dirt in the center. When I want 2 tiles and I dont want to see a the grass line between them, i use grassy dirt. When the terrain up I use rock and I lower the terrain bit when I use Heavy dirt.

Dont make things always look the same, I mean you must change them as much as you can. Add river, swamp, cliff, mountain...

That is what I usually do and my terrain looks good. Use many environements doodads too. I suggest you take a look at the blizzard map it will help you.

i know blizzard does this. But look how they balance it out by putting little things inside the open spaces? try and do that. Always have something to balance the picture. if i just have a big boring path sometimes i'll add a river running through it or a house on the side large enough to create a different kind of picture. In my opinion there are 2 ways to create a picture. The first being having an equal picture that feels full. Or having something be the focus of the picture with just a little more focus on it than anywhere else. Whenever you make a focus point though make it seem like the middle. As time goes on this will becoming easier to do. Oh and there are 3 kinds of terrain also. realistic terrain *good for some rpg's and cinematics* gameplay terrain that makes efficiant use of space with a little aethstetics to it, primarily focused on giving the user optimum use of the terrain *good rpg's and maybe an AOS or 2* Then theres BNET terrain. This is my favorite kind of terrain to make. It's all about using big things to make it feel much more crowded than it actually is. This way you can cut down on doodads *and lag hopefully* but still have an okay looking piece of terrain. It has the smallest amount of doodads and makes good use of the cliff tool *which never should be used alot*

If your making a cinematic, add doodads where ever the camera is at point.