tips on terraining

I try to make my own terrain for maps but I just can't think of how to do it. I can tinker around with the grass and stuff but trees and hills and stuff I just end up rushing.
I want to make good looking terrain like on blizzard's campaign maps but not sure how long it takes to do it:Sany tips on how to make better terrain?I can attach some of the stuff i've done if you want

1. tile variation...use this often...nobody wants to see a map that is all grass and a dirt path..even if it is a TD people want to see variation it pleases the eye and makes things stand out and seem less dull.

2. doodads...use these as much as possible without maxing your map out and increasing loading time. also i recomend to NOT use any of the nasty cinematic doodads blizzard gives you cuz they look like dog sh*t. if im terraining a forest i usually use the ashenvale tileset and randomly place: lumpy grass, vines, leaves, some regular grass about 2 kinds of trees lots of shrub doodads some hollowed logs, some mushrooms and flowers around the logs, some birds maybe. doodads help make things look more realistic...whens the last time you saw a forest with 5 trees in perfect alignment with flat grass across the whole thing? never! so use these!

3. height....well this is a given all things need height...flat things arent realistic and dont look good...please use the raise and lower tool noise gives you big spikes of ground which looks horrible...

4. creativity...you need some of this to be a good terrainer..go to www.google.com and search for nature, cave, town, lake anything you want to terrain and just study them...be inspired by them and than just let that create your terrain.

the best looking terrain is the most realistic terrain IN MY OPINION! some people will not agree with this but in my opinion i like terrain that inspires and makes me feel something not some crazy warped version of reality ^^.

good luck on this

thank you,i'll give it a shot

Open up melee maps with the tilesets you'd like to learn about and study them.

best way to learn how to terrain is look at the real world, and try to copy that, and i mean copy it as exact as you can. Over time u will learn how real terrain forms and u will understand ;)

make as big mountains as u can with wc3 cliffs

...dont be an ass

ok is this good?Tried to do a forest. I know the trees are probably weird:\but that's my attempt at terrain,I think i make things like castles or whatever better

Most likely you will get more comments if you post screenshots.

It's actually pretty good for a beginner, but you've made a couple of mistakes.

1) It's all flat. I suggest using the noice tool then smoothing it out with the smooth tool (no shit?! =p).

2) Always avoid sharp kinda angles when terraining (in all aspects cliffs, tiles trees etc), make em more "fluffy" if you know what I mean.

3) Where the hell are the doodads man?!

4) That Grassy Dirt is fugly when you overuse it that much, it's fugly enough as it is.

5) At most places it's good, but you need more tile variation!

6) The gaps between the trees are too big but I guess it's going to be melee so..

BAD:

I don't know how. That's my problem with the trees,never know how to place em right>_<I sorta feel like I picked a wrong kind of map to do a forest,because I think ashenvale would be better but I needed to do lordearon for campaign reasons. So less with the grassy dirt...I think I can do that. I personally thought the best part was the top left with the tinker,and doodads...used a couple enviromental ones,and a few broken wheelbarrows

You can place ashenvale trees on the lordaeron tileset you know.

i think he don't know what WE can actually do, so he cant turn off collision to put the trees closer :/

well i mean some of ashenvales terrain:\what do you mean by collision?

He means that when two units collide they'll stop, but if collision's turned off they'd just walk right through eachother. That's a pretty bad idea for a melee map imo. :P