I was playing around in Blender a few days ago and messing with
cloud textures when I found a great way to make landscape
all in Blender and decided to make a tutorial(yes, it does use the noise tool).
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Open up Blender and delete the default cube.
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Add a grid, using whatever numbers you like, remembering that bigger numbers
means more vertices. For this tutorial, I’ll use 60 for x and y resolution. -
Scale the grid up just a little bit,as the texture won’t make very tall landscape with a very big grid and then add a new material.
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Press F6 and add a cloud texture in the very first slot (slot 0).
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You may be wondering how we are going to make landscape with a cloud
texture, when you could just use the Gimp height map plugin, Terragen, or the A.N.T.
modeling script right in Blender. Well, we are going to make the landscape with a height map. With height maps, you need to remember that white = very tall, grey = halfway tall, and black = no height. Now that we know that, this makes the cloud texture a very good candidate for land. The next thing we are going to do is adjust the size. You can set the noise size to whatever you want, but I want to have several bigger pieces of landscape, instead of a bunch of little ones so set noise size to 1.00 and set noise depth to 6, as we need max detail. -
At the top, we can do hard noise or soft noise. Both give different landscape, so experiment with both, though I am going to use hard noise. Next, press the colors button (right next to the texture button) and adjust the contrast to 3.45 and the brightness to 1.9. Jump back to material buttons with F5 and go into the map to panel. Turn off col and press nor once. Turn the nor value all the way up, to 25 (that will give it a nice rocky look). Go into the shaders tab and then change the diffuse shader to oren-nayer and the specular shader to blinn. Adjust the rough value in oren-nayer to 1.5 (rock is really rough). Also, set the spec value to 0.01 and hard to 25. Now we are ready to make some mountains! Press tab to go into edit mode and press the A key twice, in case you had any specific vertices selected. Go into front view and press noise (located under mesh tools in F9). You should see the vertices jump up a good bit like the picture below. http://uploader.polorix.net//files/222/Noisemodeling.PNG
If not, you may have scaled your grid up too much, so make it somewhat smaller.
Depending on how high you want your mountains, press the noise button to your required amount, though I pressed it 8 more times. The mesh doesn’t look very good right now, as it is not only blocky, but it is missing that last bit of random detail.
If you are not in edit mode, go into it and select all the vertices. Press fractal (in the same row as noise under mesh tools) and enter a value of 15 in the random factor. Hopefully, your system can manage all these vertices, and if not, then don’t do fractal subdivide. If you want to, you can use a smaller value in the fractal box and do it several more times for more displacement. Be careful though, as too much randomness will cause vertices to separate, causing tears in the mesh that you will have to fix by hand. Finally, tab out of edit mode and press set smooth. Then, if you want to make the mesh even more smoother, add a subsurf modifier, with what ever level you want (I’m going with 1 for quicker render times).
If you desire, you can scale up the mesh however big you want though for close-ups, you may want another level of subsurf or another subdivide. Then, apply colors, set up the lights, and render! Below is a link to my final render.
http://uploader.polorix.net//files/222/Finalmountainrender.png.jpg
Discussion:Wow! You just made mountains all in Blender, without having to do generate height maps in Photoshop, or Gimp. The next step is to go beyond the tutorial. Try using different noise sizes and noise basis’, and even try using other textures like musgrave and marble. Or try using two textures and see the conclusion. The possibilities are almost infinite! Have fun! 
