Some of My Terragen Renderings

[Shroom Man 777]

First times:

[sketerpot]

First times:

That second one looks pretty cool. Your main problem is that your surface maps aren't cool enough. There are surface map collections you can download, and Terragen comes with a few which you should experiment with.

Also, it looks like you've changed the cloud color by changing the color of the simple haze. This is generally a bad idea; if you want cool cloud colors, you should do it with the sun and some of the other atmospheric settings. You can probably get cool effects changing the cloud color, but unless you do it very carefully it will look fake.

[sketerpot]

Is there a program like this where you could do futuristic cities?

I'm afraid you'd have do put that one together using a scriptable 3D modelling program, some futuristic building models, and some scripts. Terragen just generates terrain pictures, at least until version 2 comes out soon.

[sketerpot]

Incidentally, I can't recommend internet resources on Terragen too highly. You can download landscapes, terrain files, atmospheres, and lots of neat tutorials. By putting together some of these things, you can get some very nice pictures very quickly. Used judiciously, they can make excellent starting points for your own original creations.

For example, here I put together a nice terrain file with a good surface map and a really weird atmosphere. All of these were downloaded from Terranuts. I then tweaked everything, getting the camera angle net up nicely, and rendered it.



I'm not too happy with the surface map or the shadows, but the terrain is particularly striking.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Since this is a good thread to put Terragen renderings, and since I've found I like putting up Terragen renderings . . . I have another one.


(click to see full-sized image)

With the spat of gas giant planets being discovered that sit in orbits that occupy the habitable zones of their stars, there's been talk that some of these planets could have Earth-like moons, like a Yavin IV or Endor from Star Wars. This was my attempt at visualizing such a scene.

The final image represents a habitable moon of a gas giant. It is almost midnight local time, so the gas giant is almost fully illuminated. Almost lost in the glare is the shadow the moon casts on the gas giant.

This is a composite between a Terragen rendering with an enormous sun whose sunlight strength is at ~30% (to match the 0.3 albedo of a planet covered in bands of water clouds and deep blue atmosphere) with a picture of Jupiter from the Cassini flyby that was colorized to a hazy blue-white, and then brightened until the background sky of the picture matched the sky of the Terragen rendering. Then I tacked in the Jupiter picture over the sun in its own 90% opaque layer, matted the two together, added a bit of lens flare with Photoshop and voila.

[Lord of the Farce]

Wheee... My first Terragen renderings (I tried it out after seeing this thread):

001:

Fairly typical mountain/greenery/water scene... But damn, I love the shadow effects in Terragen.

002:

My favourite. I call it the "Cheap-&-Nasty Lava Substitute". This was done by (IIRC) changing the Sub-surface Colours, the Foam, pretty much killing Max Reflectivity, maxing out the Wave Properties, and playing around with the Wave Variation settings a bit.

003:

Same as 002, just different POV. It looks nowhere near as nice as 002, as the "Cheap-&-Nasty" part is more obvious.