Making Gran Canaria Island

[virts]

Hi all,

I need to make a huge island for a game I wanna do in free time. But I wanna make such a big island that it is easy to get lost in. I was thinking if it is possible to make such Island in terragen and then import it to blender. So is it possible that terragen does any of these things (p.s. I need an island to be totally different at different places, desert, this and that):

1. Randomly just make a huge island, terrain, landscape with given size (so i say 50square killometers). If it is possible, what should I read to learn to do it?

or

2. Scan some island like Canary islands from maps.google. If possible what's best way for me to do it. I've seen that there are many ways of scanning real data like DIms and national maps seamless server but asking like a noob: what's the best way?

example of what i need:

[Oshyan]

Although Terragen can definitely generate very realistic terrain, I think if your primary use of the terrain will be in a 3rd party application, you might be better off using a dedicated terrain modeling and editing application. There are many available. Perhaps World Machine, or Geocontrol, Leveller, or the free Wilbur. Another option, if you want something like a real-world terrain, is to use DEM data. There are some very well detailed terrains of the Hawaiian islands available for example. http://seamless.usgs.gov/ Most likely you will need an application to convert them to a format you can use in Blender.

- Oshyan

[Dark Fire]

There's loads of freely available software for converting from DEM into various other formats - I can't remember any specific examples, but I do remember that converting some DEM data for Tenerife into a format that Terragen 0.9 liked (did it only like .ter files? I can't remember...) was easy. And if it's easy to get it working with Terragen, then it should be even easier to get it working with Blender. Personally, I'd base the island on a real island rather than just make my own island - the real world is far more realistic and amazing than our own creations can ever be...