Is minib3d a reliable and tested solution?
The way you build the terrain heavily depends on what you would like to do with it. If you're working with tiles it's quite easy but depending on how complex the terrain will get and your target platform looks like you could run into performance issues as the number of draws will increase and at some point turn into a bottleneck.
You either could combine a certain number of tiles into bigger meshe(s) or you just go for one big mesh without any tiling were you have to implement some sort of LOD (depending again on the target platform, the size of the terrain,...). At least if you're dealing with one big mesh you can also write you own terrain painter with some splatting.
But doing all this right certainly isn't a small job for a first serious 3d project...
The way you build the terrain heavily depends on what you would like to do with it. If you're working with tiles it's quite easy but depending on how complex the terrain will get and your target platform looks like you could run into performance issues as the number of draws will increase and at some point turn into a bottleneck.
You either could combine a certain number of tiles into bigger meshe(s) or you just go for one big mesh without any tiling were you have to implement some sort of LOD (depending again on the target platform, the size of the terrain,...). At least if you're dealing with one big mesh you can also write you own terrain painter with some splatting.
But doing all this right certainly isn't a small job for a first serious 3d project...