Break time

 We're off to Wales to live in a tree house for a few days. Expect a dip in Blender output. When I get back, I'll no doubt be full of Blender beans, ready to build stuff from my piles of sketches that I'll be doing while I'm mostly disconnected.

Path scene - early stage

Recent terrain sculpts were made in World Creator. I'm going to add a bonus back to my terrain pack on Blender Market (which changes its name, tomorrow).

Playing around with the earlier bridge scene. 

A Monorail element of the beanstalk. Planning stage.

In the Easter break

 I took my boys on a day trip to Lincoln on Tuesday. Yesterday, we had a lazy day. I've been in a creative funk. It's more a lack of focus and drive. I start things, feel bad about them, then go away and start something else. It's bad news for productivity. Get a strong plan. Make a strong start. Then, when you fall down, you get up and carry on instead of going home.

Sketchin 

Although I've lacked a strong plan, I've had some creative time with terrain sketching. 

A common fault I see and have often done myself is compressing a landscape scene so that flat lands, foothills, and snow-topped mountains are all in the same one or two-kilometre stretch. While creatively, this will give you maximum bang for your terrain mesh bucks, it isn't very realistic.

The benefits of stretching out your scene's view distance:

• Those distant mountains can benefit from smaller mesh density.
• Atmospherics require fewer creative tweaks as you're sticking closer to real-world scales.
• You get more sky. Make your sky a co-star of your scene, not a bit-player!
• It's easier to get a more epic feel with wider viewing angles.

Some disadvantages:

•  It's harder to create a scene where you are close to the subject. You can do this by staging a foreground plate directly in front of the camera. Dense scatters and a more intimate subject can all happen there.
• This approach doesn't work for every situation. If you're going for a more telephoto-style scene where the background and foreground squeeze together, you may have to deal with more dead space. 
•  Wide angles mean less scope for camera culling. Either the scenes use more resources, or you might need to reduce things to stay within your system's rendering budget.

Installed and configured the full version of True-Terrain 5.1