Some of My Terragen Renderings

Hardy · Post by **Hardy** » 2005-06-11 06:53pm

I've been playing with Terragen for quite a while, now. Just thought I'd show SDN some of my better results.

This one was completed yesterday. It's part of a larger picture, but since I didn't like how it was balanced, I'd cropped it to a ~16:9 aspect ratio, getting rid of most of the sky. The bit of poorly rendered rock in the foreground is there just in case I want to composite anything in there. This looks good if you sharpen it by 15%, FYI.

Completed this afternoon. It was taken in the same terrain/world as the one above, only the camera and sun have shifted. Minimal changes to the landscape were made. I'd banked the camera to give the feeling of flight and leave this one open to compositing. This is my personal favorite.

Completed yesterday. Although the easiest to make, it seems to be everyone's favorite. Same terrain/world as above, with only drastic shifts in the sun and camera's postion.

Two of the above three were able to be passed as "vacation photos", interestingly enough.

Completed at least six months ago. A pithy attempt to rip off some aspects of Jurrassic Park.

Completed last November. It served as the backround to a composite I'd made for a friend about a WWE wrestler. Not very believable, though.

My first ever presentable piece, completed last year, before November. It falls apart now, but was very impressive back then.

An attempt at bluescreening with PhotoStudio (not Shop) using the above image. Click to enlarge.

I have a few more, but for moral and pride issues, I refuse to post them.

Comments? I'd love to hear from a person who has TG.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-06-11 07:27pm

Uts and I have used Terragen on and off over the past two years. Those look great. I especially like number 2 and 4.

Post by **The Wookiee** » 2005-06-11 07:53pm

Some of these really have a sense of serene, almost fantasy-esque, beauty.

Hardy · Post by **Hardy** » 2005-06-11 08:08pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Uts and I have used Terragen on and off over the past two years.

It's a very good program, mostly because of its ease of use. I await imminent update .

Those look great. I especially like number 2 and 4.

If Spanky likes it, that definitely is a compliment. Thanks. Number two was complex enough to take a relatively high 11:38 (lovely coincidence) to render, so I'm glad it's well appreciated.

The Wookie wrote:Some of these really have a sense of serene, almost fantasy-esque, beauty.

Thank you. I didn't have any specific intentions as to the mood, so I'm glad to know this.

Fleet Admiral JD · Post by **Fleet Admiral JD** » 2005-06-12 08:12am

I just started with Terragen. Would you have any objection to me putting some of my own in here?

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2005-06-12 08:14am

This is amazing. VERY realistic.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2005-06-12 01:10pm

cool!

Hardy · Post by **Hardy** » 2005-06-12 02:08pm

Fleet Admiral JD wrote:I just started with Terragen. Would you have any objection to me putting some of my own in here?

None at all. Go ahead.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:This is amazing. VERY realistic.

Thank you. I think Terragen's realism has to do a lot with how it renders lighting and sky. You'll notice in a lot of movies (especially in scenes filmed against a blue screen) that those aspects sometimes never look quite right. Quite rarely do I ever see jarringly unrealistic lighting in this program.

salm wrote:cool!

Gracias.

I've also made worlds resemling Titan and the Moon, but haven't been able to procure a good shot, yet.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2005-06-12 02:15pm

The images look very realistic. The only places where you really see that it´s a cgi is where land meets water. I think the edges are bit hard. Maybe you could put a little blur onto these sections in photoshop. A really light blur.

Hardy · Post by **Hardy** » 2005-06-12 02:36pm

salm wrote:The images look very realistic. The only places where you really see that it´s a cgi is where land meets water. I think the edges are bit hard. Maybe you could put a little blur onto these sections in photoshop. A really light blur.

Yeah. You can defnitely see it on the sun's reflection off of the water in number two and I've been told that quite a few times before about other renderings. I'll definitely take that into consideration next time.

Fleet Admiral JD · Post by **Fleet Admiral JD** » 2005-06-12 02:50pm

My three best so far

Hardy · Post by **Hardy** » 2005-06-12 04:13pm

The third's my favorite. Nice textures, surfaces, lighting, and sky. My only problem with it is that the snow is too glossy, which I doubt it your fault since it's not uncommon in TG renderings.

The second one is cool. I like how the water is of similar colour to the stone and snow, which somehow gives an idea of how cold your world is. The sparse lighting also enchances that effect. In the future, you should be more careful with the scuplting tool, since your peaks are a bit too steep and narrow in my opinion. I'm often guilty of that, myself, as you can see in my fifth rendering.

Though I very much like the sunset and water, I'm not too fond of your first one, to be honest. In my opinion, it would've loooked much better if you'd reduced the concentration and distribution of grass (since they contrast oddly) and enabled 3D clouds.

Overall, not bad. Your work just needs a tad more realism, which isn't difficult to improve.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2005-06-17 10:34am

By the 17 moons of Shangri-la, I resurrect thee, dead thread...

Which is to say, I picked up Terragen, and found it to be quite a fascinating tool. Especially since it lets me create alien worlds. Inspired by the recent discovery of a rocky planet orbiting a red dwarf, I did some creative interpretation on what a rocky planet that would actually be habitable might look like. After some hours, I came up with the following (all images here are thumbnails. Click to see full-sized 1024x768 images):

This represents the view near the edge of the daylight side of such a planet. Modeling suggests that, a thick enough atmosphere would efficiently transport heat from the hot-side of the planet, to the cold-side of the planet. This is needed because the planet is tidally-locked to its parent star. Thus, you could sit in that same spot for the duration of the planet's seven day year and never see the sun move. (This picture was created in Terragen, but finishing touches were added with Photoshop.)

One of the hazards of living on a world like this, is that red dwarves are flare-stars, which throw off giant flares which can brighten the star two, three, or four times in a matter of minutes or hours. This picture represents such an event. The sun is bright enough to be readily seen through a mile of clouds and fog from an approaching storm. You can see that the sun here appears to be seven times wider than our sun appears from Earth . . . due to the close distances at which planet orbits.

This is an image taken from the hot-side of the planet. It is always noon here. The only clouds to be seen here are some high-altitude clouds heralding the movement of tropical waves of moisture-laden warm air toward the colder twilight and night-sides of the planet. It is like the tropics, year-round. With no storms to churn the waters, they are smooth and crystal clear. Though this side of the planet bears the brunt of its parent star's tempestuous nature, primitive, extremely hardy lichen-like organisms still cover the rocks.

Tinkerbell · Post by **Tinkerbell** » 2005-06-17 10:45am

Wow guys. Just wow. All of you. Those are beautiful.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2005-06-17 11:55am

xBlackFlash wrote:

Wow guys. Just wow. All of you. Those are beautiful.

It´s very easy to use, it´s free, fun and the download file is only 1,4MB. You should try it.

Get it here

IndustrialNoise · Post by **IndustrialNoise** » 2005-06-17 12:07pm

Wow, that looks like an awesome program. Maybe I'll try it.

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-06-20 12:56pm

Here are some of my best ones:

It's a really neat program.

Manus Celer Dei · Post by **Manus Celer Dei** » 2005-06-20 02:16pm

I spent 20 minutes fooling around with this and then when I try to view the fruits of my madness BAM! the image renderer window does jack. I just get a grey screen.

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2005-06-20 03:47pm

Wow, I am amazed. sketerpot, your third one is just amazing, though the cloud textures look a mite stretched. And your 4th is just, beautiful.

Fleet Admiral JD: Nicely done on 2 and 3, though for 3 keep in mind that typically grass doesn't grow out of solid rock at temperatures below freezing, unless that green is copper or something.

I may have to play around with this program myself. It looks like incredible fun.

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-06-20 05:35pm

Manus Celer Dei wrote:I spent 20 minutes fooling around with this and then when I try to view the fruits of my madness BAM! the image renderer window does jack. I just get a grey screen.

You should try 640x480 test renders at less-than-final detail regularly, so you know basically what your larger image is going to look like. And you should save regularly, too.

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2005-06-20 05:40pm

I'm currently downloading the program. Give me some time to tinker, and I'll see what landscapes I can imagine.

[edit] OK, how the heck do I get plant-looking stuff and reddish rock? Everything I'm getting looks icy.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2005-06-24 02:23am

I'm downloading right now, but alas and alack It's 2:30 am and I dun feel like staying up any later. I'm not even gonna install it now. But once I get it installed tomorrow I'll show you anything that doesn't suck that I make (if I can make stuff that fast that is. I've used 3-d modelling programs before but all my models have always sucked so I hold little hope for terragen. But I can try

).

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-06-24 10:58am

darthdavid wrote:I'm downloading right now, but alas and alack It's 2:30 am and I dun feel like staying up any later. I'm not even gonna install it now. But once I get it installed tomorrow I'll show you anything that doesn't suck that I make (if I can make stuff that fast that is. I've used 3-d modelling programs before but all my models have always sucked so I hold little hope for terragen. But I can try ).

I've used 3D modelling programs before, too. My models sucked, universally. Terragen is different. Check out what I, the 3D incompetent, just did:

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2005-06-25 08:20pm

I have some more, now with some explanations of how I made them! The explanations will be located below the pictures they describe.

I'm not very happy with the water on this one, but I did discover that the secret to making a moonlit night is just to turn the light strength way down, mess with the atmosphere a little, and get used to having the sun always look like a full moon.

All in all, not great but an interesting study.

This is a testament to how easy it is to make great sunset scenes. For raw beginners, here's how: you find a camera angle you like, change the sun direction and altitude so that you can see it, and increase Light Decay/Red. Then just add some nice things like water and clouds (try 2D and 3D for the scene, see which looks nicer), and maybe some haze, and you're set.

When you have something good, save it. Then you can play around with settings with gleeful abandon. In this one, I messed with the water, the clouds, and probably other things as well.

One of the interesting things about these last two scenes is that they used a terrain file I downloaded from Terranuts. It's really nice; after a while, you get sick of automatically generated terrains. There are some really cool ones out there; right now I'm playing with a Wyoming-style terrain with plenty of weird spires.

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2005-06-25 09:25pm

Is there a program like this where you could do futuristic cities?