Image of an island, any help?

[xdmx]

Hi, I'm new to terragen 2, and actually in 3d graphic too. I've looked into it because I need to create a (quite realistic) image of an island with a shape of the "N" letter with some trees on it, a simple beach and stuff like that, nothing too complicated. I think that knowing how terragen works it takes just 10 minutes to do it... but actually I'm here to find out exactly that... how does it work? Or maybe is there any file repo where I may grab some examples and try to edit them?
Thank you!

[Tangled-Universe]

I'd make a 2k black square image with a white 'N' inside and blur it so that you won't have sharp edges anymore.
Save it as a .bmp or low compression jpeg. Not TIFF.

Inside Terragen 2 go to the terrain tab and choose "add terrain" -> "displacement shader" -> "displacement shader".
Make sure that you have connected the displacement shader connected to the "compute terrain" node.
You can see that in the node-network which is the bottom right viewport.

You can drag the view of the node-network by using ALT + Left MouseButton and dragging your mouse.
Zooming by  using your mouse-wheel.

Click with your right mousebutton nearby the displacement shader and choose "create shader" -> "colour shader" -> "image map shader".
You are asked to load an image file and choose your freshly created square image.
Inside the imagemap-shader set the projection type to "Plan Y". This will map the image onto the surface of the planet.
Set the size of the image in metres in the "size" field. For instance, if you set it to 1000x1000m then the square image will cover a 1000x1000m area.

Now connect the output of the imagemap-shader to the "function" input of the displacement shader. (that's the input on the right of the displacement shader".
Double-click the displacement shader and set the displacement to something like 50 (metres). Could be anything, also dependant on the size of 'N' you're after.
The displacement shader will now displace the surface upwards where the colour of your image is white.

Create a water-object by going to the "water" tab on top and choose "add water object" -> "Lake".
Select the water object and set it's Y-parameter to anything as long as it is below the value of the displacement-shader. 40 metres for instance.

You should now have N-shaped island, 50m high surrounded by a 40m deep lake/sea.

Hope this gets you started.

Cheers,
Martin

[Dune]

Save it as a .bmp or low compression jpeg. Not TIFF.

Why no TIFF?

[FrankB]

yeah... why no tiff?

what has the tiff done that you don't like it anymore, Martin? 

[Tangled-Universe]

In my experience the TIFF format is a bit unpredictable. Not all TIFF formats are being read correctly by TG2.

To be more precise, as far as I know only 32-bit TIFF, IBM order without compression, is being read correctly by TG2.

Saving as jpg or bmp makes "sure" it works.

[Dune]

I always use uncompressed 8-bit greyscale tiff's (for masks), never had any problems. For color textures often also tiff (but then RGB  ) Problem with jpg is that you might get artifacts, which is not so nice if you want clean hard edges. And jpg is smaller on your HD, but it loads just as heavy as a tiff.

[Tangled-Universe]

I always use uncompressed 8-bit greyscale tiff's (for masks), never had any problems. For color textures often also tiff (but then RGB  ) Problem with jpg is that you might get artifacts, which is not so nice if you want clean hard edges. And jpg is smaller on your HD, but it loads just as heavy as a tiff.

Ah that's good to know about the 8-bit TIFF and such.
I'm well aware about the fact that it loads as heavy as uncompressed data.

I just wanted to make sure that whatever I suggested for his workflow would work and not would run into silly problems like files not loading (properly) because of bad image formats.