im trying to make this

Started by Que, February 04, 2007, 07:24:35 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

old_blaggard

Very cool image!  It's fun to see how Terragen can be used for images other than just plain nature.
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

dhavalmistry

Quote from: old_blaggard on February 14, 2007, 09:29:31 AM
Very cool image!  It's fun to see how Terragen can be used for images other than just plain nature.

very true....
"His blood-terragen level is 99.99%...he is definitely drunk on Terragen!"

Que

Yeah well done with the finished peice if i ever manage to produce something like it i'll let ya no lol

And to whoever it was i was commenting to lastnight about doing themed pics etc ..it was exrtemly late and i perhaps sounded abit arsey so my opologies didnt mean it to be i just basically meant what the others have said in the comments on ere its just nice to do something a little differnt sometimes :)

Que

Dark Fire

Quote from: old_blaggard on February 14, 2007, 09:29:31 AM
Very cool image!  It's fun to see how Terragen can be used for images other than just plain nature.
I doubt anybody even dreamed of creating images like that when they first started using the old Terragen.

Will

what was the original terragen amke for, was it alway ment to be a product or was it just a project?

regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Dark Fire

Quote from: Will on February 14, 2007, 04:21:55 PM
what was the original terragen amke for, was it alway ment to be a product or was it just a project?

regards,

Will
Good question. How does something like Terragen start?  ???

Will

well there is a code and a compiler who lover each other very much and...
sorry had to do it

regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Oshyan

Originally it was just a hobby project I believe. Matt started it when he was still in University, on the Amiga. I  have the source code to "Terragen 1" (aka Terragen 0.1) sitting around somewhere, but I've never had an Amiga to test it on. ;D

After that I believe he ported it to the PC and then made it public in a limited demo form, probably realizing the commercial potential but unsure what he wanted to do with it just yet. He was still in school at this point and he published the first Terragen website on his school's server. You used to be able to access the original page using archive.org - the address was http://www.york.ac.uk/~mpf103/terragen/ Unfortunately it seems that the university is now blocking archiving of its pages and that means all previous archives are now inaccessible as well.

I suppose it was around that time that the original mailing list was setup on Onelist, later to be bought by another company, finally turning into Yahoo Groups. I believe it was founded by Rainer Duckerhoff who is still around from time to time. A year or two ago Yahoo claimed they'd be getting rid of older messages in large groups, but it seems that most, if not all of the original messages are still there in the archives, all the way back to 1998. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/terragen/messages/1

Anyway so TG was made public, people started downloading and talking and checking it out, and it grew from there. The fact that it was free and doing things that no other program at the time could do, producing already great results, was very interesting to people. The community grew fast, now over 5000 members on the Yahoo group I think, and in only 2 months we have over 1600 members registered here.

After Matt left school he worked more on TG then got a job at Digital Domain, one of the top film and TV special effects companies in the world, where he laid the groundwork for Terragen 2 in creating the underlying "TGD" rendering system. Matt worked at DD for 4 years I believe and during this time public updates of Terragen were infrequent, which frustrated many. Matt did manage to negotiate a good deal with DD whereby he could keep much of his source code and release updates for TG, despite the proprietary nature of his work at DD.

Since he has left DD Terragen 2 has been the main focus and of course we're all familiar with the delays there as well. However significant changes have continued since Matt's Digital Domain days and with the release of the Technology Preview I think we have turned over a new leaf in Terragen and Planetside's development. 2007 is the year that Terragen will come into its own and prove itself.

Still, despite all the progress, I sometimes enjoy revisiting the very oldest TG versions. I have 0.4, which still works on XP... :D

- Oshyan

Will

#38
Matt worked for Digital Domain? wow I never new that, thats really cool. hmm so it all started on an amiga huh wow never though it was that old. Thanks for the history Oshyan.

Also do you do coding or are you just doing fourm moderation stuff?

regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Oshyan

You're welcome. I've always been fascinated by the program and its history. I'm something of a collector too as you may have gathered from my post (I have just about every publicly released version of TG and many besides). So it's nice to hear when other people are interested in it on that level too. I've actually thought about writing some kind of more organized and researched "history of Terragen" article, but I don't know if there would really be much interest. ;D

- Oshyan

Will

It might be good for the main site, I for one like reading them that other compenys post for theiir products.

regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Dark Fire

Quote from: Oshyan on February 14, 2007, 05:08:36 PM
I've actually thought about writing some kind of more organized and researched "history of Terragen" article, but I don't know if there would really be much interest. ;D

- Oshyan
I would certainly be interested.

Hannes

OK, here is the final image. I changed the POV, added some clouds, some haze, some F18s and some terrain.
Little postwork: I added motionblur to the fighters, engine glow and smoketrails in photoshop.


dhavalmistry

"His blood-terragen level is 99.99%...he is definitely drunk on Terragen!"

Dark Fire

Wow. Great picture. Terragen is so versatile...