Crysis Terrain Details

You can do both with different results. It depends on what you exactlyh ave in mind, open an official map and see how it's done there. I remember that it was tried to do everything in voxels, but you don't get the visual fidelity and detail that models can give you. For instance the gorges that open up when the sphere opens, those are models.

If you want cliff sections, make two or threee basic large cliff models and overlap/rotate/scale them slightly differently. Works a treat If you really want to go to town make a few large rocks and add them in too.

I believe it's because you assign a sub-material to the rock instead of a material. When in the material editor, you have to select the parent for instance, rock_beach_basalt, instead of rock_beach_basalt -> rock. Else it looses the reference of the parent material on reload, and can't find a material called simply rock.

yeah, for a more natural look, just use brushes (rocks) play with different materials and hide seams with decals and or smaller rocks!

Are you allowed to change the materials from the roads on that project of yours? If so, open the material for the concrete road, and tick vertex colors ON, so it fades out on the tip of the road-tool. (You can specify how long the fading is, by adding more points to the road-tool, use ctrl + left click where you wish to add a new point, on road editing mode)

Either that, or place the concrete road beneath the dirt road, and tweak the "sort priority" values, obviously put something like 1 on the concrete and 2 on the dirt, so the dirt gets on top. (You can have until 255 btw, this is useful to play with sortings on decals and road tool)

Even with this, it might need further work, like put some decals on top of the blending area to disguise the blending even more. I don't see any decals in there yet, use them as much as you can, they're awesome!