Help needed: How to enhance a in-game meadow?

[MintJulep]

Basically, for the purposes of my map, a portion of the terrain requires a vast expanse of just grassy fields. No roads, rocky terrain, and forests like most people use - Also, the river patterns are set on the map, so we can't introduce too much water.

In real life it would look like this:

This

But the big problem is that in-game WarCraft, it looks like this:

This:

My question is, how can we make a terrain designed to be a large field of grass look less like we were just too lazy to terrain? Is there any way to enhance the look while preserving the theme of open fields, like using different grasses?

I've read all the terrain tutorials here and elsewhere, so I feel well-versed on the basics. But none of the generally accepted methods of placing doodads into the natural-looking patterns seem to apply to this particular instance.

 

[Arcany]

You need tile variation, add some plants, grass and a better tree. Also use raise and lower to create some height variation.

 

[TheBlooddancer]

You need:

Grass-doodads, tile variation, height variation, and tree, shrubs and such-doodads.

 

[MintJulep]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I can't say I agree - the entire problem here is that the more random shrubbery, tile variation, and trees, the less the terrain is like an empty meadow as pictured. Although certainly raise/lower ground would help slightly (probably not with that particular grass tile though, and definitely not enough to make a major difference IMO without using rock tiles for cliffs, at which point would make the terrain no longer a meadow).

The screenshot I posted was definitely NOT a serious terrain attempt, it was just to illustrate my problem (that despite looking fine in real life, emptiness looks terrible in-game). The challenge then, was to figure out how to make a passable terrain with those particular qualities of having seemingly little variation, if that's even possible. I could make a serious attempt with the typical grass/doodad/raised ground placement found in well-terrained maps soon and post it here, and I'd expect it'd look perfectly fine by the usual standards due to the many details - but critically, it still won't look anything like a meadow as pictured in the OP.

 

[LordDz]

For me, the first hidden button doesn't even show anything..

 

[Arcany]

Yep, it's very hard to make a good looking meadow with the wc3 editor, nearly impossible when it needs to be playable. Just try to make one and then we could give some tips to improve it.

 

[Restor]

try to make it something like these

I do not not the authors though

 

[~Void~]

A nice, spammable grass doodad and a better tree. Look no further than our very own Ultimate Terraining Map, stickied in this forum.

 

[MintJulep]

Actually, I was dismayed that I couldn't find a spammable grass doodad in the Ultimate Terraining Map - all the grasses were single leaves instead of a large clustered group (unlike say, the corn doodad which takes the default WE corn and combines a cluster of 20 or so into one doodad), and very small. So it'd take tens of thousands of the available grasses to cover any reasonably sized map area, which will create problems involving lag and loading times (especially because the UTM grass is animated, I feel).

For instance:

That picture shows an improvement, but even this very small, screen-sized area consisted of over 2600 doodads and caused my computer to slow to a crawl. Using this technique to cover even a tiny map would be completely unfeasible - the most I'm guessing anyone would be comfortable with in-game for such a bland effect is 50 or so per screen (even that could be worrying if the meadow areas are very large, as it is in my map).