Best way to add Hills/Valleys to large flat surfaces?

[MegaPixel]

I'm working on a large exterior animation of a housing subdivision. I have the streets, sidewalks and grass areas defined. I would like to specify areas in my flat grass object to subdivide so I can raise these areas up or down "smoothly" to get nice gradual berms and pond basins. I have tried creating a custom spline base topo map and using the "terrain" modifier but I can't control the resolution of the tesselation very well. I have also tried "shapemerging" the outlines of my berms and pond basins into the flat grass object, then tesselating these areas so that I can push/pull vert.s however triangular tesselation yields very pointy/jagged unsightly results. I'm looking for advice on the best way to add elevation detail to large flat surfaces without having to tesselate/subdivide the entire object?

 

 

 

Thanks in advance for the help - MegaPixel

[Chad Warner]

This might be a lot more convoluted than other peoples solutions, but what I would do is shapemerge where you want the berms/ponds to be located, detach those objects so they are their own object(s). Then use the "subdivide" modifier on the berms to add points, you will need to play with the size to acheive the result you want. Then go to sub object vertex, use soft-selection at the size you want, then pick some points and move them up or down. The soft selection will give you nice smooth topography.

 

-Chad

[STRAT]

the displacement modifier is perfect for this job