Easy Way to Hand-Draw Terrain

[biomatter]

Hey, I'm a newb when it comes to Terragen 2. Years ago, I used to play around with the old version of Terragen, and it consisted mostly of drawing shapes and stuff and messing around. Now, I am thoroughly impressed by how much they've added to Terragen 2, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to create custom terrain. Skimming the topics, I heard something about drawing heightfields in Photoshop, and using Painted Shader layers hooked up to Heightfield nodes, but I can't figure it out (Is Gimp an acceptable double?). Can anyone help me, and please keep it simple? Thanks a million!

[gregsandor]

Any image program like Gimp, Paintshop, etc will work.

[Dune]

Just take a black base, a white brush and paint anything, save it as a greyscale TIF and load it into an image map shader. Set to Y projection, adjust the size of your terrain to the same ratio as your file height/width, set displacement to 500 or so to start with and plug it into the compute terain. You'll see a terrain then. If you want to see the white, plug the same image map shader into the color input of a newly made surface shader after base colors. Lots of variations of this method are possible, the scope is virtually endless.

[biomatter]

Hmm... Every time I try to load the TIF into Terragen, it crashes. When I made the map in Gimp, was I not supposed to use shades of gray? I'll keep fiddling with it, but....

EDIT: Okay, so I tried with a pure black-and-white TIF, and now it works, but the lack of greyscale, doesn't that prevent me from doing more detailed work? I can only seem to cut blocked shapes in/out of the ground.

[Hannes]

You could use the old Terragen for creating a terrain like you're used to and then import it into TG2 via "Heightfield (load file)". There you can play with the fractal detail amount. Maybe this helps.

[Henry Blewer]

You could read John's excellent tutorial. Here's a link to the pdf file.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7733.msg82586#msg82586

[biomatter]

Ah, thanks for all the help, guys!  I'm beginning to move in the right direction.

[Kadri]

Hmm... Every time I try to load the TIF into Terragen, it crashes. When I made the map in Gimp, was I not supposed to use shades of gray? I'll keep fiddling with it, but....

EDIT: Okay, so I tried with a pure black-and-white TIF, and now it works, but the lack of greyscale, doesn't that prevent me from doing more detailed work? I can only seem to cut blocked shapes in/out of the ground.

From the last post you seem to have this working . But i tried with Gimp and i had not a problem with a greyscale TIF image .
just for your knowledge.

Cheers.

Kadri.

[nikita]

There is a programm called TerraBrush which you can use to, in a way, "draw" mountains: http://www.cyberfunks.de/page/terrabrush/download.htm

[TheBlackHole]

There's also Wilbur:
http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html
Wilbur has added bonuses other than heightfield creation and simple manipulation. It has three types of erosion, the ability to create  heightfields in spherical projection (if you wanna do a whole planet at once), and more.

[biomatter]

It also has the bonus of being in English. 

Okay, I was able to get .TIF's to work right. For some reason, the first one I made was corrupted, and that's why Terragen didn't accept it. I've been able to create them now with a working grayscale. I was even able to use a Painted Shader to color that specific portion of terrain. Thanks for that, guys. (I was trying to make a heart for Valentine's Day for my girlfriend - got it done just in time!)

Now, my biggest problem is the program refusing to cooperate! I was trying to create a stratification effect on the sides of some mountains, but they simply would not appear (a generated heightfield, if that's significant). They would appear near the base, but not up higher on the mountain. Also, when I tried to restrict it using a Distribution shader to a minimum angle, ALL of the strata would disappear, even if I set the minimum angle to 0. This also happened later when I tried to add minor details to the scene, like Fake Rocks, and a very weak Power Fractal terrain layer. For some reason, they just disappear if I put any restrictions on their angles. It bothers me to no end. Any help in this direction would be much appreciated!

[nikita]

It also has the bonus of being in English. 

You can change the language in Terrabrush under Bearbeiten>Sprache to English, French and various other languages.

How are you creating your strata? Via an image map shader? If so, make sure to check repeat X/Y etc.