I was recommending your friends with so many ideas do this and you host them from time to time.
All the objects are like a kit out of a box. You just lay them down following a few rules. Easyscor and Greebo have manuals and you can talk to terrain builders in the terrain editor section. I don't know the layout of your Furball Lake terrain but I suspect it's probably the same dimensions for distances as the center island furball area on NDisles.
The sculpting tools in the elevations tab are all projected against the terrain polymesh surface using a brush that can be set from 660ft to 6 miles diameter. It's like using a finger to push clay around. You can create a simple test terrain and finger paint ground and push it around to get an understanding of it. Kind of like set the elevation tool to 5000ft, set the brush to 6 miles. Then place it on the ocean and click. Then you have a 5k high 6 mile diameter cylinder of ground.
There is a raise hill tool and bull dozer tool that both cut and push terrain. The bull dozer tool you can lay your brush down on the ocean on one side of the cylinder and pull across to the other side on the ocean and click. Depending on the diameter you set the brush to, you will now have a water channel through your 5k cylinder. Or place the brush on an edge of the cylinder, pull it out and down to the water and click. Now you have a ramp. Or the raise hill tool, set the brush at 6miles, lay it on the water and click for a bit. Up raises a mountain. Or pull it and you raise a ridge line. Reduce the diameter of the brush, hold down the shift key, then you now have a cutting tool to cut into the mountain and ridge you just made.
I use the bulldozer at it's smallest brush size to create micro terrain around GV spawns. I carved some of the mountain features in my new project in the canyons with it. Hitech does not write a manual for the terrain editor, instead most of the tools if you hover the mouse over it will explain it's use. Even if you use a copy of L3DT, you still have some amount of touch up in the terrain editor before your terrain is ready to upload.
The terrain editor is pretty simple to use, understanding Hitechese in his short tool explanations sometimes is tricky. Still, pointing and clicking and pushing buttons to see what broke didn't take very long. You just create a test terrain where you slop ground around and run the tools against it to see what kind of a mess you can make. Pretty quickly you get the feel for what the tools do. Everything you need to know is right in front of you in the terrain editor GUI in simple Hitech english. It's rather a basic editor.
