beginning with Terragen3 (finally!)

[ewong]

Hi,

I finally have a half-decent setup to which I can run Terragen3 on and I'm happy that the rendering is
a heck lot faster too! 

Now I'd like to know where to start.  I've played around with the rendering of the default scene, but
what exactly is the 'proper' way of learning Terragen?    Learn heightfields? Shaders?  At this point,
the interface is very overwhelming and complicated.

I'm reading the tutorial and I feel it's only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. 

One question.  Is it possible to generate a landscape that includes a city scape?  I remember reading
that Terragen can render objects and I've seen the gallery that shows different objects (i.e. ships),
would I need some other 3rd party software to generate an actual world with cities/towns?

Thanks!

Edmund

[mhall]

Have you looked over the video tutorials provided by GeekAtPlay?

http://www.geekatplay.com/terragen-tutorials.php

The first series gives a very good overview of the interface and many of its functions and there are two project based ones exploring scene building in more detail.

You can watch most of them for free on YouTube, or the author offers them for purchase and download.

https://www.youtube.com/user/GeekatplayStudio/search?query=Terragen

I've been watching them lately myself and find them very well made.

Regards,
Micheal

[Dune]

Welcome Edmund. I know it's very hard to start, but after a few days reading tutorials and the wiki, you'll get a basic understanding of how things work. And you're right about the tip of the iceberg; there is so much possible, once you understand the workings of the nodes. You can import objects as solo objects or as populations. I've built city scapes by importing hundreds of houses, but you can also import one huge city object.
If you have any specific question, shoot, we're here to help. But get to know the basics (how to apply larger displacements for terrains, smaller displacements and textures for faked vegetation and rock, masking them by height and slope, that sort of thing) first, I'd say.
And there is a lot of information in the older threads, so use the search function and read, read, read.

[Brrrt]

Hey,

Sometimes the wrong settings generate the best results.
I started out with Terragen again after a few years break.
I used to experiment with TG1 in the past and with Bryce 4, but they were too slow for my computer/liking then.
Having to wait for over 24 hours for an 800x600 picture was beyond my level of patience.
Start off with basic textures and experiment with skies and how making rocks and all that works and what the settings do. I liked all the free files in the shares of this forum. They are great to start out with and the tutorials are cool as well.
Don't turn the rendersettings too high at first.
Making layered textures is still hard for me and I probably don't know what I am doing half of the time, but I get interesting results for now.
Remember to save your TGD files for comparison. And maybe you found some cool effect that you want to use later.
TG is fairly difficult, but we will get there in the end. I'm not into animations because I don't have my own renderfactory like Disney and the free version doesn't do animations.
Here are some of my initial experiments (from right to left and up to down in chronological order)
I noticed that my FB friends liked the mistakes more than the good versions sometimes
[attach=1]