Terragening

Doing some Terragen terrains these past few days. Downloaded a free version of the software on the weekend and found a fairly good YouTube tutorial series on the basics. Once you get past the guys constant sniffling (blow ya fucking nose!) he goes through a fairly good step by step process on creating a basic scene. With the basics down, you can start to tweak and explore. At the moment I'm trying to master the terrain "strata and outcrops" shader and so far the results are pleasing. My geological interests primarily center around sedimentary rock systems so generating realistic looking sedimentary rock outcrops pleases me immensely!

I am interested in applying Terragen terrains to GIS (one of my current study units) or the other way around, applying rasters used in GIS generated from real world maps and sensing to Terragen. This would be a fantastic way of generating 3D renders of real world data, eg: radar terrain height maps. This is being done by people, a quick search through the Planetside forums reveal that people have been rendering GIS data in Terragen already. Ultimately, I would like to generate a GIS of a virtual world consisting of a wide range of data types in a meaningful layered way. This is something I have been wanting to do for a VERY long time, I just didn't have the tools or know-how to do it!

Here are some of the terrains I have generated this week. Keep in mind I have just begun exploring this software, and scenes so far are a little half baked in some ways.

Simple fractal landscape with little modification, only 3 surface layer shaders and basic water and atmospheric features. Desolate yet nice.

Simple fractal landscape (some artifacts quite visible) with snow. The white layer above the water surface is reminiscent of precipitation left by evaporation.

 High latitude islands shrouded in low cloud.

Playing with object placement. In this case pine trees. Very processor intensive. Realism in this pic is not the best but it was a useful experiment.

Rather pleased with this mornings effort, the cliffs and ridgetops in particular. I would like to superimpose some sort of erosional softening over the layers in the lower half of the image, not sure how to do this yet.