Of all the graphics software used in movies and TV the most impressive is the kind that generates natural looking landscapes in the computer that can be composited (that is to say seamlessly blended) with live action elements. Terragen is a free, at the moment at least, program for PC and Mac which does just that, and to an amazingly realistic degree.

You start off by making your basic landscape as grayscale bitmap, either in the program or in an external editor like PaintShop or PhotoShop. In this case the white areas are high and the dark areas are low. The software then makes this bitmap into a mesh, a 3D shape which can be rendered using lighting states set up in the program. The mesh can then be dressed with a variety of colors and moss and snow to your taste. You assign settings to the sky and water height and off you go for a render.

The program operates over a number of windows which are driven from a toolbar which generally sits on the left of your screen and you and open and close the windows at will. You don’t have to have them all open at once, but I found that during the development process it’s common that you have at least two open at a time, usually the rendering control and one other so you can preview the results of your tinkering. The program also handles animation so you can generate a sequence of images and move the camera to make “fly-throughs”.

The finished renders can be breathtakingly lifelike, and some of the more experienced users on the Terragen web site have produced pictures which I’ve shown to friends and family and easily fooled them into thinking they are photographs. (I’m so mean.)

Like all good software it’s easy to use but hard to master; doing basic landscapes is easy, but doing the complex photorealistic shots is hard. However within 10 minutes of downloading the program and just clicking default settings I created the image you see here. If that’s what you can do in 10 minutes what could you achieve in an hour?

For a more details and a free download go to http://www.planetside.co.uk/.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.