Hello all!

This is my first post here at SimplyMaya, but I've been using Maya for a while in various classes at my college.

I'm having difficulty attacking a problem: I need to make a desert scene in Maya. I have built the terrain and now need to texture it. I'm familiar with UnrealED's terrain layer painting concept and really like how you can set a base texture layer then paint on top of that with a second layer, then add a third layer. I need to do sand around the edges where the land hits the water, and dirty rock for the desert, as well as a few patches of another rock type, to vary it up.

How can I achieve this in maya? I know I can make one big texture and apply it directly to the terrain but close up, it will be very low quality. This is for an animation where I need it to look good up close as well as from far away. Can you do good layer painting in Maya? Can you even apply two textures to one mesh on top of eachother with varying alpha textures? I've never done this before, surprisingly.

Any tips would be appreciated, and I tried to figure out the Layered Shader but didnt know how to get it to work properly. Any verbatim steps to get what i need going would be super-awesome.

Thanks in advance and looks like this is a wonderful community for Maya enthusiasts (and frustrated users ) Bye!