I am heavily thinking of using terrains generated by "World Machine 2" exported as meshes to serve as terrain in the world editor (we will be using "CityEngine" to do buildings, streets, etc exported to Esenthel)

Question: If I use World Machine 2 to generate meshes for the terrain, will I be able tp paint grass and foliage on the mesh derived terrain or can you only paint grass/foliage on heightmap generated terrain chunks?

It has to be a heightmap. If you export as a heightmap instead of a mesh from World Machine, then you can import it as a heightmap into Esenthel and be able to paint it.

Rats

I prefer the crispness of terrain that is built from a mesh as opposed to heightmap based terrain (less "muddy"). Darnit... I wonder if there is any alternative to using painted grass? Exporting instanced grass meshes from the DCC tool?

Ive done extensive testing in a few engines and found that only mesh terrain gives me what I want. In other engines (like unreal or Source) I ended up using heightmap based terrain and then tossing mesh chunks on top that better approximated the detail I wanted.

The benefit of this method was that I also got the freedom to have those objects be destructible.. giving me a sort of fake destructible terrain.

I was so happy to find that I can export meshes straight to terrain in this engine, but oh well... have to figure out the grass painting replacement.

can you post some screens of your mesh terrain vs heightmap terrain?
you can increase terrain resolution in World/New or Heightmap/Resize

ill finish esenthel re-install next week and post screens.. i was asking before i dived into that