Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Mountains Out Of Molehills 2
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This tutorial shows you how to use displacement mapping to make a simple environment.
1. Make a grid. (Add/Mesh/Grid) 32x32 will do just fine.
2. Set it smooth. (Editing/Link and Materials/Set Smooth)
3. Make a new material for it. (Shading/Material/Add New)
4. Make a new texture for the material. (Shading/Texture/Add New)
5. Go to Shading/Texture Buttons. You can see your newly created texture there now.
6. Change Texture Type to Clouds.
7. Change the name of the texture to be more descriptive. For example GroundDisp or something similar.
8. Go back to Shading/Material buttons. You can see our cloud texture applied now but it's not applied correctly yet.
9. Go to Shading/Map To. This defines how the selected texture is mapped on our material.
10. Uncheck Col and check Disp on and set the Disp slider to a value like 0.200
11. Set camera and a few lights to the scene.
12. Render.
[noob note: I just got a flat gray plane when i did this, I believe you have to press Nor on and increase the Nor value to something relatively high, I used 11.37.]
(another noob's note: In my current version (2.46) I don't think Nor is what you want. Nor will affect the bump-mapping effect (normal values). You want to have Nor unchecked, Disp checked and the slider for Disp set to something like 0.200. Though I'm not clear on the difference between Nor and Disp.)
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- Nor (normal) only changes what direction the point on the plane looks like it's facing. Disp actually moves the points on the plane up and down
You can tweak the environment easily by changing Nor value in the Shading/Map To. This defines how strongly the displacement texture affects the material.
You could also add subsurfing to the ground area to get smoother results. Also feel free to tweak the texture and try out different alternatives.
By adding some Mist in the World buttons, adding a Cloud Texture to the World and make it blend from white to gray we could get something like this: 
