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.
