For a while now I have been trying to accomplish nice smooth and somewhat complex terrain generation, in the long run I would like to evolve this into a planet generator.

Started out with reimers tutorials in XNA


Then moving onto pure OpenGL and trying to accomplish creating and displaying the map via shaders:


Which takes me to my last attemp



I have recently been looking up quadtrees
[media][/media]

But im stuck as to what to do next.

My thoughts are:
Generate a large and detailed plane, say 10.000x10.000 units
Use some noise function to give it height
Create normals
Then create index list
Create a quadtree of max level 100(for example)
then using the current quadtree level, use it as a stride for the index list (so at level 0 I draw a single quad using each corner of the plane as a vertice, at level 1 its subdivided into 4 quads and so on untill the max level)

But I dont know if this is how it works, can anyone give me some advice?
Also If anyone has some resources on Procedural Terrain on Procedural Planets it would be much appreciated.
Thanks