Yeah, the rougher terrain looks more natural. Unfortunately, it could end up making it stand out poorly against the surrounding POI/tiles since those won't have the same style of terrain unless you improved all of them.
I made one POI (and a small bear den, which doesn't really count) and then gave up on it. The POI Editor is just a pain to use and I didn't want to spend so much time on it. I have updated that POI a few times now and it looks nice. It's just a recreation of the house of the person I usually play the game with and it's pretty accurate, overall. But it's also nothing special. I wouldn't have the patience to do anything really intricate. Not with this POI Editor, anyhow.
I felt the exact same way about the editor when I first tried to use it. I was really annoyed that virtually every single command was different than every other editor that all seem to have very similar controls to each other. And not only the commands, they way the editor works. It took me many times coming back to it before I finally gave up and suffered though a 101 tutorial.
I like this guys' tutorial series.
As far as it standing out. I think it will be fine, we'll see. And if I have fun doing this, I just might edit them all lol.
The bear den most definitely counts! And it's a great idea since outdoor POIs are far less common. That something that could possibly be used as an entrance to the cave project. (Not mine)
https://sites.google.com/view/caveprefabguideline/cave-prefab-guideline
I find replication is the hardest thing to do. So if you replicated your friends house well enough people can recognize it. That's amazing!! if I could do that, I would try to recreate all the houses on my block. If I wanted to go crazy. If you live in a new neighborhood with cookie cutter built houses, you could probably find their floor plans too.
I do understand how unintuitive an anti-user friendly the editor can be sometimes. So, if you ever wanna give it another shot. Feel free to add me on discord and ask 'stupid' questions you would never ask in front of thousand of people. I'll do my best to help you without making you feel like you asked a dumb question. The hardest part for me was training my hands to remember I'm not in Space Engineers or Empyrion, so I had to stop editing in those for a while and only do this until my brain remembered it doesn't work the same.
And as far as patience go, it does help. But, I usually have about 3-5 active projects at the same time. So if you get tired of working on one, you can do another and come back to it. No need to do the entire thing in one go. Sometimes I'll load one up, add window sills, or just texture a single room, save, and play another game.
