A large landscape might call for gradual changes from one kind of ground cover to another. Examples would be grass and dirt on a forest floor, or rocks and snow on a mountaintop.

There are a number of ways you could create the texture map for such a landscape, such as mixing two maps using a Noise map to vary it across the surface. But with that type of setup, it would be hard to control where each map appears on the terrain.

Instead, you can use vertex painting to put different maps on specific areas. This technique gives you fine control over the final look of the landscape while retaining natural-looking variations from one map to another.

Figure 1: Create a terrain object with any method and apply a VertexPaint modifier to it. In the VertexPaint dialog, turn on Vertex Color Display - Unshaded. By default, all vertex colors are white. You ll use the VertexPaint tool to paint some of the vertices black.

Figure 2: Make sure the color swatch in the Paintbox is black. Click the Paint tool and move the cursor over the object to see the disk-shaped paintbrush tool. Drag the cursor over the object to paint areas black. Here, I ve painted the peaks black and left the valleys white.

Figure 3: In the Material Editor, create a Standard material with a Mix map in the Diffuse map slot, and assign it to the terrain. Select a Color 1 map for the black...