I just realised it's been nearly three years since I started using Terragen - but also a few years since last time I picked it up and did something with it after I was just starting to get into it. I know it does take a bit of dedication, but I do have a lot of other things to do as well, and so it is easy to sometimes drift away from one interest to focus more on another. Also, my computer wasn't the fastest at the time either, which was a bit frustrating after a render had to be abandoned after a few weeks.
Now, a few years later and with a computer that is roughly 3 times faster, I thought I'd start from scratch again, starting to work through the quite useful Ben McDuff tutorial - again. Somewhere along the way, I decided to go exploring, though, thinking there had to be some other interesting mountains around as well. I can't remember for sure whether I did some changes to the basic landscape fractals too, but whatever I did, I found this lovely 1621m peak, which I think has a nice look to it, choosing - as I always seem to do - a viewpoint that I could have taken the picture from if I were hiking in the actual landscape myself. Might be coming from a background as both a hiker and a photographer that makes me want to stick to the ground for my scenes.
The render has not been optimised in any way, and a full 6000x4500 looks like it will take somewhere in the neighbourhood of 32 hours. Once that is done, though, I think I'll delve a bit more into the basics again, experimenting with the different nodes to learn them better - or at all: at the moment I still have a beginner's vague notion of how things work but I wouldn't know so much what to do if I had a specific look in mind for my scene. I do like playing around with parameters just to see what happens, though. That is, after all, how I learnt Basic programming 30 years ago, as well as other things later. It works for me.
Well, welcome back then! If you learned programming, you'll get the hang of TG, no doubt. Hope to see more work by you. If you have any questions, just ask. This is a nice start anyway.
Great start - just needs some real vegetation. The lighting is excellent.
yeah that peak is very nice ;)
In my modest opinion it appear almost fine right now, a very nice landscape! Did you use a .dem file for the heightmap? It seems like a dolomities landscape ( mt. Pelmo or Sella towers), sure adding some vegeattions and maybe working on the shaders will increase the realism... i want to see your next development on this work! :)
Thanks for the feedback.
@kalwalt. I did not use a heightfield for this. It's just the beauty of the Power Fractal shader at work.
I do like landscapes that are a bit barren as they remind me of mountains I have seen in my home country of Norway, but it would be suitable to have a bit of mountain vegatation here, I think. Clumps of grass, moss, lichen, some pygmy birch and the like would add a bit of life to it, so I'll look into that for future iterations. Also, the shaders are quite basic with little variety, and I want to add a bit of definition to the lake's shoreline too to indicate that the water level has varied over time, a bit of shore erosion etc.
I asked this because it seems a known (for me at least...) landscape, glad to know instead that became from the power fractal shader! ;)
Usually i used WorldMachine to create the hiegtmap for some my project-experiments, it's easyer to design the heightmap, you can view your work immediately better than TG3 in this sense but of course you can't do a rendering....
Sure i will follow your future dev. of this work! :)
I do hear WorldBuilder mentioned every now and again in the forums. Perhaps I should check it out as a way of generating heightfields once I start experimenting a bit more with that. For now, I have only used the Terragen's built-in procedural fractals for my basic landscape generation.
I'm installing the basic version now to try it out.
very cool image. reminds me an rpg landscape
I like it. I like the light the best.