Question about first steps on a big project with Terragen

[MatthewMacDonald]

Hello everyone, I'm new to actually posting on the forums, but... I've lurked for some time. Gleaning advice and seeing the pool of very talented people on here and well... it's inspired me to attempt a project of my own now, and I'd like to ask your advice on the subject.

I'm a science fiction author and game designer, and I'd like to actually try and construct a complete cartographic set of the fictional world prior to the release of the first books in our series, so that people can actually get cool visuals to go with the land along with the rest and a foundation, if you will for me developing like, where towns would be, and where certain boarders might reasonably reside. Things like that. I really love Terragen, it's gorgeous and really a joy to use so I'm looking at this first and foremost. Here's where my questions come in.

I have non-standard worlds, some are a series of flying islands, some are large rings (some continuous, some broken up with what looks to be asteroid belt like structures around them) and they are well, earth sized. (Earth at some point is included in this) and I'm not going to be as foolish or arrogant as to ask "how do I do it all!?" but if anyone has any hot ideas for how I might make some of these nonstandard formations to work from, I'd greatly appreciate. I want to break ground on the project (strangely appropriate analogy) and I repeatedly open terragen and go "uhhhhh..." so, I'm asking for a bit of advice.

Thank you very much in advance. Again, if this is the wrong sub form, my apologies. I'll move it if I am able.

[yossam]

Welcome to the forum..............#1...........search the forum, I know the two things you mentioned are discussed in the forums.

[MatthewMacDonald]

Thank you for your reply:

By 2 topics, what do you mean? What search terms, exactly, would you use to find these.

On building a realistic earth I've found:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,19654.msg193522.html#msg193522

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,1175.msg11799.html#msg11799

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,2147.msg20933.html#msg20933

None of these appear to address anything that I might be using for my work.

On building non standard planets, I can't seem to find any results, perhaps there's a better term to look for them with?

Perhaps a little more information may be more useful than simply suggesting the search. Thank you for checking and reading though!

[Oshyan]

There are several people who have attempted and - in my opinion - fairly well succeeded at doing ring-world scenes. Doing a complete ring is challenging, but may be possible. The biggest difficulty is getting atmosphere to appear to cling to the inside of it, but there may be ways. If all you want to do is an asteroid ring, well there is one included in the free Terragen presets pack volume 1! http://planetside.co.uk/free-downloads/terragen-presets-pack-volume1/
It could at least be an interesting starting point.

The realistic Earth mostly depends on good texture maps, which are available for free from many sources including NASA. If you need close-up renders that can become a challenge as you have to use really high resolution image data which pushes memory use to the max. But for further-away shots (where you see the whole planet surface) the lower resolution options can work just fine.

Floating islands have also been achieved. We have an animation from Hannes Janetzko that did exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8dxNeVXgc8
You could easily adapt that into larger-seeming floating "worlds"/islands. I believe he used displaceable objects like cubes or spheres and then procedural displacement functions to get that look, along with Populate On Object for the trees and roots.

A useful general technique when trying to do crazy, non-standard planetoid stuff is to remember that you can have the atmosphere of a planet even when the surface of the planet does not render. So you can use this to create, for example, a small dome of atmosphere over a floating island world (make a new planet, scale it down so it is roughly the size of your floating rock world, turn off the visbility of surfaces in the planet node, position so the atmosphere is over your floating island). Similar techniques can be used to get the atmosphere on a ring world, dyson sphere-type object, etc. Teragen is designed to be hacked and for the user to do weird, unexpected things, so think creatively and try things out...

If you're still stumped for where to start on some of this stuff, I can dig up some of the older threads where people talked about e.g. ring worlds, etc. But I'm pretty sure if you just search for "ring world" you'll get some relevant stuff. I remember notably that Richard Fraser (cyphyr) was one of the people who was successful at it.

- Oshyan

[MatthewMacDonald]

There are several people who have attempted and - in my opinion - fairly well succeeded at doing ring-world scenes. Doing a complete ring is challenging, but may be possible. The biggest difficulty is getting atmosphere to appear to cling to the inside of it, but there may be ways. If all you want to do is an asteroid ring, well there is one included in the free Terragen presets pack volume 1! http://planetside.co.uk/free-downloads/terragen-presets-pack-volume1/
It could at least be an interesting starting point.

The realistic Earth mostly depends on good texture maps, which are available for free from many sources including NASA. If you need close-up renders that can become a challenge as you have to use really high resolution image data which pushes memory use to the max. But for further-away shots (where you see the whole planet surface) the lower resolution options can work just fine.

Floating islands have also been achieved. We have an animation from Hannes Janetzko that did exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8dxNeVXgc8
You could easily adapt that into larger-seeming floating "worlds"/islands. I believe he used displaceable objects like cubes or spheres and then procedural displacement functions to get that look, along with Populate On Object for the trees and roots.

A useful general technique when trying to do crazy, non-standard planetoid stuff is to remember that you can have the atmosphere of a planet even when the surface of the planet does not render. So you can use this to create, for example, a small dome of atmosphere over a floating island world (make a new planet, scale it down so it is roughly the size of your floating rock world, turn off the visbility of surfaces in the planet node, position so the atmosphere is over your floating island). Similar techniques can be used to get the atmosphere on a ring world, dyson sphere-type object, etc. Teragen is designed to be hacked and for the user to do weird, unexpected things, so think creatively and try things out...

If you're still stumped for where to start on some of this stuff, I can dig up some of the older threads where people talked about e.g. ring worlds, etc. But I'm pretty sure if you just search for "ring world" you'll get some relevant stuff. I remember notably that Richard Fraser (cyphyr) was one of the people who was successful at it.

- Oshyan

That might just give me a start. As I progress I'd be happy to post findings, process, and really see what I can do. Also, the dyson sphere sounds fascinating in itself. Just hearing non spheric worlds can be possible is awesome. I'm looking forward to it, thank you!

[Dune]

Here's something for a start, put together from scratch. Just one possible way. But it's pretty hard and I've only done something like this once, long time ago.

[MatthewMacDonald]

Here's something for a start, put together from scratch. Just one possible way. But it's pretty hard and I've only done something like this once, long time ago.

Thank you, and yes, I understand I'm looking at something difficult. I'm not new at map design, but this is my first forays into 3d over 2d design in making realistic maps and I'd like to see if I can't pull it off with these tools. Lots of these will be conceptual "full maps" that exist only in their render world, then I'll slice them down to create loadable areas to be used in the game.

Would anyone recommend companion software with Terragen? Like should I be building certain elements in like, Worldbuilder or Zbrush/Blender then importing them into the terragen stage? Or is this something I should try and approach mostly in Terragen?

[Dune]

It very much depends on what you want to highlight in the whole project. If it's a basic overview of a terrain, you can do a lot in TG, if you need particular rocks or objects up close (and I guess you will), it's best to make in ZBrush/Lightwave or something and import. Or if you need eroded terrains World Machine may also be an option to make a greyscale heightfield and erosion/flow masks.

By the way, in the file above I put the camera at the southern pole to look closely onto the ring, but it may be that the north pole is the center of the TG world as a whole, so to speak, so it might be easier to navigate if you lower the whole planet and keep the camera at default area.