But you don't find these in nature very often. Enter Terragen, a "landscape generator". With it, you can create a landscape by simply playing with its components (terrain, water, atmosphere, lighting) and render that. To me this is incomparably better than the best video games.
This is my Terragen gallery. I just started it, I will be adding more very soon - I am playing with this all the time!
The 1.85:1 aspect ratio is because I am a movie
geek and I find it much more pleasant, more dramatic. I render my images at
1280x960, then crop them.
Terragen has a bit of a banding problem, especially in
the skies, that seems to be a very common problem because most of the
Terragen images I've seen exhibit that. Cropping masks the worst of it.
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Beginner's luck - 2/17/2003 This was the very first image I made with Terragen. Just playing with the terrain elements, the snow, the water... I was lucky, it ended up looking pretty good. The image was photoshoped a bit to remove some of the haze, I like the more saturated look.
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Tea Time in Mordor - 2/18/2003 I was faffing around with some terrain, trying to _not_ use water - because that can be an easy cop-out to enrich a scene. Experimenting with 3D clouds and the color of the sun I started getting this rich but foreboding atmosphere, very desolate, very dark, but at the same time with a hint of normalcy - behind of this, the sky is still blue... I did have to photoshop it a bit too, because I was aiming for a very dark appearance.
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Sunset river - 2/23/2003 First attempt at a sunset, which is one of Terragen's forte. I did not do much here except sculpt the terrain a little bit, and indeed it looks pretty good.
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