Starting to come to grips with Terragen. I like the terrain fractal and cloud fractal better than the Vue equivalents. However it I mostly create my terrains in World Machine that won’t be very significant. Except the clouds of course.

Terragen is pretty different from most other software I’ve used. Not sure how to even move something in the viewport. I guess a few more tutorials will clear that up. Someone on YT was complaining about the lack of adequate documentation and tutorials for Terragen.

So I decided to have a look at Terragen. Vladimir says it has a more realistic renderer than Vue. Here’s the default scene rendered with default settings. One gets his tutorials with the software. Looking at them now.

It’s common in making a game to have a staging area to start in. Usually some fairly enclosed space that offers few choices for action. So instead of my usual open world I’ve created something a little more constrained here.

Using another of my xfrog plants, a black poplar this time. I haven’t actually generated any variations, just rotations. I guess I’ll have to review the xfrog tutorials again.

I’ve been working on the Dark Fantasy collection this morning, but in the end couldn’t get a nice fantasy image to work so I just went for trying out a couple of default plants.  It’s worth generating new variations of a plant ’til you get one that you like.

I purchased some boats from TurboSquid. They could come in handy for a few images.

Still working on these. I used a small rise in the ground as a connecting line between the tree and the bush. Payne suggested that the elements that make up the steelyard are not necessarily the focal point, so here I’ve attempted to make the larger cottage the focal point.

I intended this to be a steelyard, with the foreground trees on the right and the trees in the background. However adding other elements to fill out the scene changed that somewhat. I guess one would have to call it a circular or U-shaped composition now.

This is a classic steelyared composition, although not otherwise very interesting. I’m reading through the calalogue of compositional schemes in Edgar Payne’s book and trying out each one.

UPDATE:

So, I made a fundamental mistake with this image. The whole point of the steelyard scheme is that the fulcrum is closer to the larger mass, not the smaller! Like a lever. Small mass x long distance = large mass x small distance. And I did it the other way. What an idiot. Here’s a corrected version, with added detail for interest. Plus I swapped out the farmhouse for a cottage because I was getting strange artefacts in the wall texture that I couldn’t get rid of.

The sky is a bit boring, so I swapped out the stratus for some strato-cumulus with volumetric shadows, as recommended by Drea Horvath. Plus I painted some grass onto the global ecosystem for a bit of added detail.

I’ve rendered this old olive tree before somewhere, must look it up and see if I’ve improved at all.

I found that old render on BA – can’t find the original Vue file though.

And here’s an image by Frederic Bec, the designer of the tree. Frederic Bec’s Olive Tree