Few basic questions from an oldtimer.

[Jgone]

Hello, i have used Terragen for years, yet i have never found much documentation / tutorials about it so i have pretty much learnt all myself.

But now i have to turn to you guys.
I bought TG4, super happy with it.
But i would love to improve faster, so two rather basic questions are:

1. What is the best way to make (foreground / ground up close) look realistic ? How / what to use to add texturing to it ?

2. I would love to put some snow realistically between slopes/ground like this : https://travelikeme.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/img_94481.png
as far as i have figured out the way to do it is to use intersect underlying , but how ?
I have played with those sliders for hours upon hours and it just doesn't do what i want it to do.

Sorry if these questions are extremely basic or i ask them in a wrong place.

And thanks upfront !

[Dune]

Realistic foreground very much depends on object quality or the finer detail of displacement and color. It's very hard to get realistic foreground vegetation without objects, for one. Fake stones or rock is much easier to do on foreground.
Displacement intersection works with the compute terrain patch size. If you raise that from 20m to say 50m the intersection zone is much softer. There are some presets available, no doubt. One way is to set the 'sliders' to 0.01/-1/1, but really you'd have to try this all out on a basic landscape with rough/big displacements before compute terrain and some additional displacements after (like fake stones), then add that surface layers with displ intersect. Do use the smoothing effect, or it won't do much good.
I hope this helps a bit.

[Jgone]

Realistic foreground very much depends on object quality or the finer detail of displacement and color. It's very hard to get realistic foreground vegetation without objects, for one. Fake stones or rock is much easier to do on foreground.
Displacement intersection works with the compute terrain patch size. If you raise that from 20m to say 50m the intersection zone is much softer. There are some presets available, no doubt. One way is to set the 'sliders' to 0.01/-1/1, but really you'd have to try this all out on a basic landscape with rough/big displacements before compute terrain and some additional displacements after (like fake stones), then add that surface layers with displ intersect. Do use the smoothing effect, or it won't do much good.
I hope this helps a bit.

This helps a ton ! Lots of new ideas.
Sure our planetside forum doesn't have tens of posts every minute but one reply like this contains more information than hundred normal forum comments. Feels good to have a place where one can ask simple questions and get help. Thank you !