Small Personal Accomplishments...

[CredePendrel]

Hello again all. 
Been trying to get back to basics (again). Found the old McDuffy tutorial in my downloads folder and thought hey what the heck. Personally, I think I learned a lot about shaders and how to layer different colours on top of one another. Hurray for small wins!!

[Oshyan]

It's amazing how enduring that tutorial has been. Must study to learn what makes it work.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Small... Modest, are we?

Good job on following and understanding this tutorial. You might as well take it further and see what comes out of it.

[CredePendrel]

Thank you N-drju! I think out of all of them McDuff1 is the best. With the others I wanted to see how the shader group would look on Perlin Ridges (McDuff2) and Perlin Mix (McDuff3). I would like to continue this piece further...I tried adding some tree populations but could find the right balance I wanted with the distribution shader. Other than the crappy lightning I am open to suggestions for additional elements to include or techniques to try. The grass bump in the lower left hand corner looks nice and grassy to me but that shadow ruins it.

One thing I haven't tried yet is the "painted shader". Maybe I could use it to paint a winding path through the scene..or try to incorporate WAS's gravel road setup that I am tinkering with in another project. I'm all ears!

[N-drju]

Populations, if you ask me, are best used with distrib shaders which, in turn, are masked with power fractals. That should give you a good deal of control rather than having just an altitude and angle to control pops.

While you're at it, you may also consider populating with a warped SSS - this can also give very natural stand areas.

Yes, painted shader is perfect if you need to precisely place certain features, though it also has many constraints. Very convenient though if masking out unwanted features is what you need.

[Dune]

The nice thing about using the painted shader is that you can follow features in the terrain that would host a pathway. Just move up closer in the preview, freeze it and start painting (right size brush). Then unfreeze, move to next area to be painted in, freeze preview again and carefully paint on. Freezing the preview is safer than painting in refreshing mode, as it may easier crash (at least that was the case in previous versions of TG). I also pay attention not to paint too close or over the edge of the preview, which also caused some crashes earlier.
I used this method to paint water streams from mountains too.