That said, I think 3D terrain is just so much better than flat terrain. Sure, the flat stuff is great for cramming in a bag if you've got to travel, but my meta has had better luck just using the terrain of either whomever's house you're at, or else the terrain available at the game store.
I'll grant you - some 3D terrain is terrible. Structures that make it impossible to see what's on the other side, hills on which you can't stand a model without it falling over, or angles that make line of sight difficult to determine. If you've got any of those, you're generally better off just getting rid of it.
My first foray into terrain building followed the same path as a couple of my other friends: massive and less-than-optimally usable. When I built it, I was new enough to warmachine that I didn't yet realize that huge terrain wasn't ideal or that cover on a hill gave someone a game-breakingly strong position. The terrain I've named "New Larkholm" measures roughly twenty inches square, and includes a building on a hill with a graveyard in front. We've since ruled that when we do use that terrain, the gravestones aren't cover. One of my favorite things about the terrain was always the stone wall, which means you can fall off one side of the hill, but can't climb up there. It creates some interesting tactical situations. Today, we rarely use this terrain piece, but it still holds a fond place in my heart.
At roughly the same time, in my Cygnaran city-building phase, I appropriated a toy streetlight from amongst my kids' toys. It's now warmachine terrain. They'll never miss it.
I also convinced my daughter to let me have a wooden house which was a project she'd brought back from school. It was originally colored with red and green marker and covered with stickers, but after I gave it a paint job it made for great terrain.
I got additional buildings by purchasing some papercraft online. One is dead simple, consisting of just walls and a roof. The other was very complex, requiring folding a two-part staircase, windows, and doors. I left many pieces off simply because I got lazy and it seemed that they'd be so fragile that they'd break anyway.
My most recent two terrain pieces are rubble and a wall. When I made the rubble terrain piece, I incorporated an old MK2 wreck marker and a lot of gravel I picked up on the ground outdoors. The base was plastic that I cut up and painted.
The wall has some stones from outside, a couple painted brush covers that I made into a pipe, and some barbed wire that I made from speaker wire I wasn't using. It was time-consuming, but it came out looking pretty good. The base on this one was balsa wood to which I added some black air-dry clay. The first application dried and warped the balsa quite a bit, so I added more to the other side. Once that dried, the reverse-warping ended in a base that was barely warped at all.
I'll likely continue creating terrain. Next up, I plan to build an acid bath and maybe some more hills.
