Create Realistic Landscape

Terragen offers you the rendering and modeling tools to create

photo-realistic landscape images and animations. You can apply special effects

for making the landscape more attractive. While creating a landscape, you can

control the weather, lakes, stars and the shader networks used for terrain,

textures, clouds, etc. The user-friendly interface lets you navigate through

tools such as, Object, Terrain, Shaders, Water, Atmosphere, etc without any

difficulty. Some of the good features of Terragen 2 include Hybrid micropolygon

renderer used for large landscapes, export high resolution objects, import 3D

objects for rendering, render millions of plants, 3D painting of colors and

masks, etc. Available for both Win and Mac, the application is free for personal

use with few limitations. Here, we create a landscape comprising sky, water and

terrain.

Click on 'Terrain' menu and select 'Heightfield generate 01' node to open the node settings window. Click on 'Generate Now' box and it will show you a 3D preview.	Press and hold 'Alt' key, use the right and left mouse button and move the preview up and down to have a better view. Click on 'visible atmosphere in the 3D preview' and it will show you the sky.

Click on 'Copy this view to the current render camera' button, at the bottom of the 3D preview. Press 'Open Render View' and click on 'Render'. Now save the file.	Select the 'Heightfield shader 01' and deselect 'Enable' box to disable the 'Heightfield shader'. The 3D preview will look like an ordinary flat landscape.

Go to 'Add Terrain' and choose 'Power Fractal' from the dropdown list. This adds a new node called 'Fractal terrain' in the nod list and the preview changes automatically.	Press and hold 'Alt' key and the mouse button over the 3D preview. This will show you the Vheight value. If the value is negative, right click and drag the image to make it positive.

Press the 'Shaders' menu and click on 'base colors'. Go to 'Color' section and click on the box at the extreme right. This will show you a color palette.	Let's color the surface. Assign Red value to 128 and Green value to 64, and click on 'Ok'. This changes the 3D preview color.

Click on 'Add Layer' button, select 'Surface Layer'and name it (Grass, in our case). Click on the color box and assign the value Red to 107 and Green to 135.	Click on 'Altitude Constraints' and select 'Limit maximum altitude'. Assign the 'Maximum altitude' value to 600. This will show you the brown mountain tops.