I hope this is the right place to post this but anyways I've been having with terrain. I've been working with unity and i'm trying to make a mountain. My issue is making look like a mountain with the given height map tools. It's driving me crazy because it seems no matter what I try it never looks anywhere even remotely close to other mountains.

I've come to realize that a large portion of the mountain is model based, however I'm not sure if it's one entire mountain or if theres a specific type of rock i'm supposed to somehow tile.

In the below image it appears that there's a base height map underneath, with some rock models sticking out of it. What type of rock model would you use for this?

Sorry if some of this is a bit of a unorganized mess i've just been really baffled as to how to make these mountains look the way they do. I've been trying with height map tools and a few rock for a couple days now and nothing I do looks anywhere near these mountains (I don't specifically mean skyrim I know that's a stretch but my mountains just look god awful).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Currently my method is just making a general mountain shape with the terrain tools, then placing rocks on it and trying to paint on cliff textures to it.

Thanks for the advice, i'm going to do a bit of reading up on it later today.

The way I most often see things like this done, both digital and physical models/sets, is that you lay down your base general shape, and then you add/remove materials to give you the fine details, usually working either from the top of the model down, or the base and going up.

What methods are you currently using to generate it? Sculpting convincing and interesting looking mountains is a really hard job, so don't beat yourself up too much if a lot of your early attempts aren't working out the way you want.

Spend lots of time on google images looking at various mountains and rock formations as well. Some time reading about geology and how rock formations are create in the real world can also help a lot as you will have a better understanding of what exactly is going on and how things should look.

You might try the Polycount environment modeling wiki page: http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting Also, try searching the polycount forum for rock tutorials.

If sculpting just isn't your thing, then you might try procedurals. In Goblinson Crusoe, I use an F2-F1 cellular generator masked with a circle and perturbed with a little bit of fractal noise, then procedurally textured and rendered to produce mountains for composing mountain ranges, as seen here. An artist could certainly do better, but it's good enough for my purposes, and represents a good balance between acceptable visual quality and speed of creation (takes only a couple minutes to do a new mountains, even accounting for material tweaks).

Thanks for the polycount link. If things don't go well i'm probably going to look into a more procedural method for handling the terrain.

For anyone reading through this thread looking for help with Unity Terrain I just found this toolkit that's helping me a crap ton. The slop textureing feature is what I was missing in the built in terrain tools.

http://unity3d.com/support/old-resources/unity-extensions/terrain-toolkit