Sunlight

[Jokes]

Last time I used Terragen was around ten or fifteen years ago. I've been getting back into it this week, apparently just in time to play with TG4 before the beta ends. Learning my way around all the new features has been interesting, to say the least.

Anyway, here's the first render I've made that seemed at least halfway worth showing off. I'm not fully satisfied with it: in particular, I wish the sandy beach looked more like sand and less like beige paint on a plastic model. But that atmosphere stuff sure is nifty. Although I'm not sure what's going on up by the rightmost peak of the mountain there... weird place for a shadow.

[Dune]

Welcome Jokes. You will see that a lot has changed since then. My advice would be to read old threads, use the search function to find specific ones, and do some tutorials. You'll soon get the hang of the basics. If you have a specific question, don't hesitate to ask.

[Jokes]

Thanks!

I'm largely in a state of having at most half a clue what I'm doing with any given feature, except that the basic surface shaders still work in a way that's close enough to what I remember that I don't have to scratch my head at them until I try to get fancy.

I find that the tutorials are less useful than I'd like, partly because I can't quite get my head around the way they're organized, partly because a lot of them seem to be aimed at Terragen 2 and since I've never touched Terragen 2 in my life it's hard for me to do the translation - I'm never sure whether I'm not finding something because the name has changed or because I'm looking in the wrong place or what. I'll probably start coming in with questions over the next few days. (The first one might be, "how do I get better-looking sand?")

[Jokes]

Did another render on the same theme, moving away from the sand since I can't get it to look right and playing with mist because lighting effects are neat. I'm happier with this one overall. The water seems off, though - it's got that shine going right up to the edge, when I would have naively assumed that the mountains should be casting a shadow.

[luvsmuzik]

Half the fun of this program is .....let' s try this. If like me when you are on day 29......you will be thinking, I wonder if they will let us use this until full version is released, haha. If you already have full version, lucky you!

[Dune]

Sand: mix or add some dense, very tiny (sandsize= 0.005) fake stones, and color them like sand. Use a warped and x or z stretched perlin fractal for some wavy ground, or search for dunes and such for a clipfile.

[Jokes]

Oooh, thanks for the tip, Dune. I'll try it out.

[Oshyan]

Most Terragen 2 tutorial content should apply to Terragen 3 and 4. A few things have been renamed but most has not, and nothing has been removed, only lots of features added since then.

- Oshyan