Issues making realistic mountains

[Zippy]

With Terragen 1, you could get good looking mountains by just generating something and would look great 80% of the time. Terragen 2 makes this much harder than it needs to be, as generating terrain just makes a block area of tiny hills. Using the "Feature scale" setting or the "Heightfield adjust vertical" operator just causes the block area terrain to look even more unrealistic as it creates a strange bulging rounded rectangle shape, as seen below:



I tried making mountains by just using heightmaps. Creating a "heightfield (load file)" does nothing. The image file shows up in the small preview, but never shows up in the terrain. Can someone tell me what I'm missing here? I'd like to achieve something like this:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/images/stories/planetside/glacier_vallery_saurav_subedi.jpg

[airflamesred]

Instead of hegithfield try the procedural or alpine fractal

[gregsandor]

Use the original TG to generate mountains, export the .ter, and render in TG2.

[Zippy]

Is that what you do, Greg?

[Redwolf]

i use two terrains sometimes, like i blend one  terrain for nountain with a painted shader and then another without paint and scale this up a bit for  hills

[gregsandor]

Is that what you do, Greg?

I use the original TG constantly while working in TG2, but mainly for other things.  Nearly all my terrain, mountains included, starts with a real-world digital elevation model. 

[Zippy]

starts with a real-world digital elevation model.

Where do you get that from?

[gregsandor]

There's information on these forums about it .  Search. 

One good source is http://seamless.usgs.gov.

Check out http://www.terrainmap.com for some good tutorials too.

[Zippy]

There's information on these forums about it .  Search.

Uh huh. The search function would be nice if it didn't flood me with php errors.

[Kadri]

...
Uh huh. The search function would be nice if it didn't flood me with php errors.

I tried here Chrome 10, Firefox 4 and  Windows internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 64 bit ultimate and home premium without a problem.
And i didn't had any for years. Just curious what you use Zippy ?

[sjefen]

You could also use World Machine to create your mountains 

There is a free version you could download and try, but it also has
some important restrictions like terrain resolution. You should be
able to create some cool stuff with it anyway. Definitely worth a try 

Regards,
Terje

[bobbystahr]

With Terragen 1, you could get good looking mountains by just generating something and would look great 80% of the time. Terragen 2 makes this much harder than it needs to be, as generating terrain just makes a block area of tiny hills. Using the "Feature scale" setting or the "Heightfield adjust vertical" operator just causes the block area terrain to look even more unrealistic as it creates a strange bulging rounded rectangle shape, as seen below:



I tried making mountains by just using heightmaps. Creating a "heightfield (load file)" does nothing. The image file shows up in the small preview, but never shows up in the terrain. Can someone tell me what I'm missing here? I'd like to achieve something like this:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/images/stories/planetside/glacier_vallery_saurav_subedi.jpg

A bit late getting in on this but I made an accidental discovery a while back. I had stashed some regerence top down views of terrain in my terrains dir and by accident clicked the .tif instead of the .ter and what do y know...it displaced and all I had to do was adjust the height in the terrain editor with the Heightfield adjust vertical shader...give that a try..you just have to have all files selected in your terrain directory as I did by accident...do that on purpose.. ...

[Matt]

You are looking beyond the edge of the heightfield. If you did this in Terragen Classic you would see no terrain outside the heightfield, but in Terragen 2 it blends into the rest of the planet. The solution is to keep the camera inside the area of the heightfield, just as you would in Terragen Classic. The default camera position in Terragen 2 shows you most of the heightfield from more of a bird's eye view, so you will need to move the camera. Terragen 2's default heightfield is 10000 metres wide, which is larger than the default in Terragen Classic (7680 metres).