First timer seeking shortcuts for landscape experiments

[johnt200202]

Hi. Let me explain what I'm hoping to do with Terragen: I want to create landscape renderings are realistic as possible for my phd research. I want some kind of easy to use terragen template that will produce similar results for the DEMs I supply. I'm not interested in fancy trees, atmosphere effects, sun rays, snow etc. All I want is an eaily repeatable method to produce images which look similar to the attached photograph[attach=#]

All my renderings will be of rurul uk mountain scenes. I don't need to realistically model the local vegetation or rocks etc; I'm just after a realistic looking moorland surface which will look as generically 'uk mountainous' as possible. Once I've found the rules for such a surface I'll use it to produce load of different images. The fact that they won't be identical to the actual location of the DEM is not important; all that's important is that users think the scene is as realistic as possible.

So how do I go about doing this? I'm quite baffled by the tg2 interface, if it's possible to fulfil my needs in 0.9 I'd be chuffed. Any advice gratefully received. Thanks

[cyphyr]

That image could sooo easily be terragen, I'm not too convinced its not !!

This is quite easy really

As your using your own supplied DEM's you'll not need to worry about procedurally generated terrains. I would suggest using two or three Surface Layers for your grassy moorland areas and another two for your rocky outcrops. Generally speaking grassy, moorland, vegetative surfaces will be more horizontally biased, whereas Rocky surfaces will be more vertical. Make sure your layer "coverage" is set to about 0.5 so it dose not completely obscure your preceding layers.  To apply colour to each shader use a Power fractal shader but keep the surface layers colour but the default 50% gray. Within the power fractal use different scales, fractal seeds and noise flavors and keep your colours muted, not too bright or saturated. That should go a long way to achieving the results your after.

Hope this helps.

If you care to post a link to a sample DEM I'd be happy to put a few versions together for you, might even be a fun and educational project for the forum

By the way what is your PHD about?

Richard

[johnt200202]

Thanks for the helpful response. Attached is a snippet of my dem along with a jpg of my camera settings in case that helps.

DEM too large, find it here http://jt133875732.googlepages.com/try2.ter

I'm working with how walkers match 3d terrain sketches (a la wainwright) with the real world. I'm keen to manipulate the real world - in this case terragen will be my proxy for the real world - in order to find out which types of terrain are easiest for users to match to the small mobile phone images. For example, when the real world has a prominent peak or outcrop (as in my initial photo) these features aren't (yet) modeled in the mobile phone sketch map. This causes matching problems. I'm experimenting a) which landscapes are hardest to match, and b) how the mobile phone sketch maps can be improved to better model the most significant terrain features.

I'd be very grateful to take a look at your suggestions. Thanks!

[Oshyan]

For your purposes you may even find that TG 0.9 is faster and simpler to use, since - as you said - you don't need complex lighting, volumetric, etc. effects. Free versions of both TG 0.9 and TG2 are available, so you might want to spend a little while experimenting with each. Documentation for TG 0.9 is on our website and for TG2 here in the forums to get you started.

- Oshyan