Hello everyone, I have a slightly unconventional request for help which I hope you will consider.
I am a grad student in the UK studying GIS, and I'm really interested in using some Terragen 2.0 renders in my academic research. Specifically, I want to render scenes of natural environments such as the example attached.
I'm experimenting with modifying the underlying terrain data to alter the appearance of hills on the skyline, for example to make them more prominent, or smoother, with a view to assessing how these changes impact people's map reading and orientation ability. In effect I want to use Terragen as a surrogate for photos of the real world: I want people to believe that what they're looking at is a photo, and not a landscape render. As far as I can see, TG2 offers the best chance to create such an illusion.
Now my problem is that I've had a reasonble look around TG classic and TG2, and while I've been able to make a start in both packages, my efforts are pretty poor. I've found a few sample 'world' (?) files around the web, and I understand how to export .ter files from my GIS programs, but I'm really looking for a way to accelerate my ability to produce renders such as the photo attached to this post.
A look around these forums suggests that it takes a great deal of time, patience and help from this excellent community to really hone one's TG skills to the point of photorealism. My request is is there anyone out there who would be willing to help get me started with natural scene generation? I don't know how your licensing works, but I would we willing to pay a fee our of my research budget if that's what it takes. I guess I am pretty tight on time, otherwise I'd try to sit down and learn this thing from scratch, so if anyone can help please let me now. I gather most of you are hobbyists, so I hope my request doesn't offend you, but I rather envisage my interaction with TG as a means to an end rather than a hobby in itself. At least in the next 12 months! If my project were on landscape rendering then I'd expect to become pretty expert in TG! But since my focus is on navigation and orientation I have limited time to devote to learning the Terragen method.
I should perhaps make clear what I'd do with the renders: they would be strictly for research use, to use in experiments on participants where they would be displayed on large screens and projectors. So while the images might appear in the odd academic report or conference (with proper creditation of course), there would be no commercial gain to me. I am aware that I'd need to purchase a TG2 license to render big (I have a fast quad core, so that's not a problem).
So I guess that questions are a) can TG2 produce something similar to the photo, b) can someone show me / create a mockup of how to do it?, and c) if they're unwilling to do b can I pay them for it? I should maybe add that I'm not interested in trees or 'x frogs' or other objects that might entail licensing headaches!
Thanks for your time, John Knowles
jknowles55@googlemail.com
