probs with the smooth tool...
 

or to be exact it's other function. i've made a big mountain and i want to split them in the middle. but even as i press on the shift key it doesn't seem to flatten anything. it just smooths it. but if it is wit doesn't flatten at the rate i've seen on that tutoral vid.

just wondered if there might be something wrong or that i'm not doing something right. cuz it's going to take me ages to bring the land back down without it

Assuming you're starting at a low point and trying to paint from there into the mountain with the flatten tool... the problem may be that it isn't engaging properly and you're still using the smooth tool. I find that Scapex isn't very responsive to my shift key; this is easily visible when I switch between the add-land and remove-land tools, since the cursor region changes color, but with smooth sometimes I miss it and use the wrong tool function even though shift is held down. Is this happening to you?

Also, keep in mind that the smaller the brush, the less you can impact the landscape. That is, you might want to try to increase your brush size to have more effect.

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Waxax aka TrollBoss

i guess that might be it. the brush doesn't change from blue to pink when i hold shift like with the edging tool. now i just have to get that working. anyone know how it can be fixed?

Well unless I'm really missing the boat when I try to flatten, the cursor region isn't supposed to change color when you press shift while using the smooth tool, so you can only tell the difference by the effect. What I do is try to flatten, and then if it doesn't work right, hit undo, pound the shift key a few times, and try again.

The flatten tool wont split a mountain.. The way I believe it works, is it lvls the land to an average (taken over the "blue highlight") hieght.

I would just use the lower/raise tool to create a valley.

yeah i think that's it. that's proparly why it works better with a larger brush as i've just found out. but i could still slpit the moutain if i do it bit by bit.