theres been great environments way before most of the techniques you namedropped in your first post. As pior mentioned, good environments come from good artists and good planning and purpose. Im no environment artist, but id guess a good artist besides the skills he got, would study the subject matter, in your case, some…
Well what worked for me last time i had to do terrain was to use a combination of techniques. You've mentioned using mix maps which works okay for smaller areas of terrain but poorly for large areas. What i ended up doing was creating a shader that mixes up to 9 texture sets (diff/spec/nrm) based on slope, and elevation.…