Terragen

[MarVelo]

Well... Theres a little super-realistic image renderer out there on the web (for free may I mention) called Terragen. Now this tool makes very realistic-ic worlds that can be menuvered with the camera to get awesome images. The image to be rendered can sized and there are tons of effects I haven't the typing fingers to list. Here is one image I made in about 3 minutes.




I don't know if this would be any good in a game because it is so realistic. Hey give me some feed back.  If you like this the website for terragen is at...

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

[Phemar]

Awesome dude!

[Andail]

Terragen was introduced to the forums years ago, and we sort of discouraged people to display their renderings here.
The reason is that with two or less clicks with the mouse, you can whip up something close to a photorealistic background.

[Chicky]

I've been messing around with Terragen at a friends house. It's nice for making pretty scenes. But unfortunatly there's no import for houses etc. I'm not even sure about custom textures either.

[otter]

I agree that I'm not sure how useful "pure" Terragen would be (unless your whole game is rendered), but I bet it wouldn't be hard to do paintovers of Terragen scenes to make them fit the style.  Maybe I'll try one later on and try to hone my crappy art skills

[skw]

Wow! It's just awesome! ...and really simple in use.

My attempt here (only one... ):


15 minutes of clicking...

Have somebody already tested it in game? I'm thinking about that... Maybe not pure renderings, but it really might be useful as hell!

Yay!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You can make custom textures for terragen, and alot more.  There should be a tree plugin someday for it

[MarVelo]

There are several tools for adding trees, rocks and other things into terragen renderings. I think a game with the proper high detail graphics of pro-quality would be very high class but marginally easy to create.

Many of the rocks, and tree tools can be found at--

http://terrasource.net

[otter]

The water is kind of meh, but the sky came out pretty well - about 40 minutes work in the GIMP:

[Isegrim]

Terragen Pics alone always look like "just another 20 minutes Terragen pic" if they are done badly and "Hey, nice Photograph, I just wonder why there are no trees" if they are done well.
Nevertheless, it can be useful if you are trying to make fully rendered BGs and use it in combination with other programs:

The following work-in-progress Pic for example was created with
-World Machine (Basic terrain)
-Terragen (Atmosphere and terrain texture)
-Treemaker (Trees and bushes)
-Corel Photopain 7 (Additional textures)
-Cinema 4D (Models and procedural textures)


This will one day be Knubblingen, the central location of my game...
(Note: This image is far from ready and just one reason why I've been away from the forum for so long... So, no need for wasting much of a comment  )

[Ubel]

Wow... :o That is simply amazing! Best luck with the game!

[Oz]

I personally hate this graphics style. Too clean-cut, and sterile.

[Mr. Mozzarella]

Have somebody already tested it in game? I'm thinking about that... Maybe not pure renderings, but it really might be useful as hell!

I remember Other Worlds having Terragen-made Backgrounds. (at least this is where I first heard about Terragen) I think the Terragen Backgrounds are in the Brown and White Province, if you played the game. If you haven't played the game, yet, I strongly recommend it (it maybe has poor graphics and animation but the gameplay and story is simply fantastic).

[What a loser.]

Wow... :o That is simply amazing! Best luck with the game!

I agree, look at HL2's graphics, they arent perpect they have litter and holes and stuff laying around.

[Mozesh]

I personally hate this graphics style. Too clean-cut, and sterile.

Me too, I like a lot of 3d rendered backgrounds but most of those look like that, and well Oz said it all.

[Domino]

I love the 3-D rendered backgrounds, reminds me of Myst.  I have tried many drawing styles in 2D but can't get a look that i really like.  So, i have tried making a background in 3-D, but i have no idea what i'm doing.

If i ever get around to working on a project, it will surely have rendered 3-D backgrounds. But that won't happen until i find a program i am comfortable with and learn really well.

When i draw with NeoPaint, everything i draw turns out looking like a KQ game (which i love) but i want something extra special.



This is what i have to show for 3-D.  I can't remember what program i used, but hopefully i can learn and get better.

SK

[Fizzii]

This is what i have to show for 3-D. I can't remember what program i used, but hopefully i can learn and get better.

Looks good! I don't know much about how to 3d model, but I would suggest using more textures for the objects, because they repeat when they wrap around and it doesn't look so realistic then.

As for Terragen, well, it's kind of neat, but looks very Terragen-ish. I particularly don't like the way it does clouds - it wraps them around in the sphere, but if you go outside and look at clouds in the distance, you'd see that they aren't distorted or stretched because they are far away. That's my opinion anyway It could probably be used for a game, by a bit of photomanipulation and painting over it...

[Isegrim]

I personally hate this graphics style. Too clean-cut, and sterile.

(Note: This image is far from ready and just one reason why I've been away from the forum for so long... So, no need for wasting much of a comment  )

Just what I said 

[skw]

Well... I like drawing my backgrounds first on paper by an ordinary pencil, then transfering them to a graphic file and painting over them (plus this whole fun with a perspective), without any "3D stuff". Personally I just don't like (but don't hate as well) rendered bgs. Anyway, this conception of using some 3D programs, like Terragen in AGS games isn't so bad... I think of mixing the styles, (eg. classic, hand-drawn foreground of an image and rendered background), not copying a prepared work. How it'll look? Well... maybe I'll put a practice picture here, in the Critics Longue soon.

Hope it's understandable.

Post-Scriptum: I've never played "Other Worlds", but I'm going to check it out.

[DCillusion]

Dark of Night, texture-tiling is of the devil!!

You want to repeat your textures as little as possible (3 or less - if possible).  Use a higher resolution texture and it will look a lot better.  Also, if you can, load your bump map as a displacement map instead.  It will give your shapes a more "natural" look.