Any Tips For Making a Underground/Cave Map? Thread

I'm going to make an underground-slash-cave type of place using Source SDK 2009. I'm making it for my senior project in which I'll be showing a beautytage very similar to HL2:DM | Beautiful Deathmatch, a Beautytage by DSoul using the map.

I'm becoming familiar with using Source SDK, but I'm far from being considered a level designer.
I'm also currently reading Creating caves using Displacements By Moaby and will be reading Displacements - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 aswell.

Any tips?

well I don't know about SDK but I would recommend using a basic map model & texture it with hard-noise-cloud on normal maps.

First make a tight corridor with rock/cave textures and make it really blocky at first. Maybe like a rectangular rock hallway. Then select ONLY the faces of the blocks that the player will see and create a displacement at the power of 3 or 2 depending on how bumpy you want it. Never ever use a power of 4, this will not work. Then create random noise on each of the surfaces and then smooth them out a tiny bit. Select all of your faces and sub-divide them and then sew them. The sub dividing will make the sides circular. Hope this has helped, add me on Steam if you have more questions. My ID is themadox and profile name is Mister Uber Ostrich.