[ March 30th, 2007 ]
Landscaping with Terragen
Landscaping with Terragen
Learning the Basics
by Dwight Delleva
Please do not recopy. If you are going to use this tutorial on your website, please give me credit.
You can download the pdf version of this tutorial from the Content Pages.
Program: Terragen v0.9
Difficulty: Easy
Rating: Wow!!!
System Requirements:
The minimum system requirements of Terragen for Windows:
- Pentium, 64 Mb of RAM, 10Mb free disk space.
- Windows 95
- RAM requirements may be lower on earlier versions of Windows.
The recommended system requirements:
- Pentium III or better with at least 256Mb of RAM
What's with Terragen?
Basically - Terragen is an amazing 3D landscape generator capable of rendering brilliant scenes of photo-realistic and surreal landscape images for artists, for filmmaking, and games. With its intuitive user-interface, it will only take you few minutes to make a landscape for the first time. Frozen icebergs and frothy cold waters, create the sun's expressive colorful beams, using plug-ins will turn water into hot flowing lava, color the sun, sky, clouds, water and the earth. Manipulate sunrise, sunset, daytime and nighttime - you name it. The only limit is your imagination and your hardware.
There are free and commercial versions of the program for Windows and Mac OS. The free download version however had few limitations such as a 513 maximum terrain size or the wideness of your landscape terrain, and the image size for rendering not exceeding more than 1280x960. For 800x600 computer screens - do not worry; the size limit does not affect your screen. The free version is a must-have for 3D enthusiasts and is totally free for your taking. Terragen is available for download over the internet.
Terragen was developed by Planetside Software. The latest version is Terragen v.0.9.43. The in-progress version, Terragen 2 is the newest version of Terragen capable of rendering landscapes with plants and other improvements while the older versions do not.
- The tutorial will cover the basics of Terragen. First - install Terragen. Open the program and explore. Upon opening Terragen, the following dialogue boxes should appear:
I. The first two boxes will appear on screen, the Rendering Control and Landscape.
The foremost step is clicking the Generate Terrain button.
(Click picture to enlarge)
(Click picture to enlarge)
II. Next step is to add water.
Click the Water Dialogue box to add water on your landscape.
(Click picture to enlarge)
III. After watering the earth - the next step is to create the clouds for the sky.
There is a default generation of clouds every time you open Terragen.
5 - Click Generate Clouds to randomly produce clouds. Edit cloud color above button. The 2D makes a realistic cloud rendition while the 3D makes the clouds look more dramatic.
IV. Colorize the Sun and Atmosphere.
6 - Click the Atmosphere box to edit Simple Haze, Atmospheric Blue, and Light Decay colors. Save atmospheric settings for use next time.
7 - Click the Lighting Conditions box. You can place the sun directly facing the camera to make it visible on the final image. Save Lighting Conditions for use next time.
(Click picture to enlarge)
V. Getting to know the last two Dialogue Boxes and Render your final image.
- You can preview your landscape in 3D by clicking the 3D Preview box. Changing the view here will affect your camera position. To locate the best landscape scene; move the camera from the Rendering Control box while at the same time looking over the 3D Preview. See what happens when you open the 3D Preview then move the camera from the Rendering Control box.
- The Last Rendered Image box shows the image you rendered
before.
8 - Save your world. Render the picture of your landscape through the Rendering Control Box.
I recommend this wallpaper size - change image size to 1024x768. Width = 1024 and Height = 768.
- Knowing Terragen better will lead you to make scenes like these:
The Lava was done using WaterWorks and Firmament plug-ins. For more brilliant examples of images you can view or download them on this site: http://www.uthtv.com/profile/undwight
Other useful programs for use with Terragen:
- TerraPainter ( Win )
- Wilbur ( Win )
- Mini Blender ( Win )
- Firmament ( Win )
- LensFX ( Win )
- Terrain Browser ( Win )
- Solaris ( Win / Mac )
- Waterworks ( Win / Mac )
- HighDynamic ( Mac )
- SOverlay ( Mac )
For questions, comments, suggestions, tips and more tutorials - why not email me?
undwight at yahoo.com
What are you waiting for? Visit: http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen and see how powerful and easy Terragen is.
More available plug-ins here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/resources.shtml
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