High Cove Renders

[Apogee]

I've got an old copy of Terragen .9 that I've still been able to use for many years, and have finally started to understand how the layering and surfaces work. So I decided to find one of my existing terrains and see what I could make with the surfaces, water effects, and such.

I'm just going with what my terrain file had (it was a randomly made thing, I can upload it and the surface files if people have terragen .9 to play with it themselves), and added a bunch of colors - sand, trees, coral... I'm especially proud of the underwater areas. I'm not saying "this is exactly what the coastline looks like", but maybe at some point I'll have a coastline to work with and make a more accurate render.

So let's hope that these thumbnails work.

[WolfCandy]

Those look awesome! Idk how a coastline on a map would translate to that, but I'm working with Tide and Ed on an awful quality map on CC3 if you want me to inbox you what we have for an example of the coastline?

[Apogee]

If it can be saved in a .ter format (which I *think* cc3 can, I can't off the top of my head remember since I hardly use it myself) I can translate it directly. Otherwise it's also possible to just eyeball it and make it by hand though it's less precise and usually winds up being a bit craptastic. A heightmap in greyscale bitmap format (small sized, with white as tall and black as low) can also work.

[WolfCandy]

I have no idea what any of those fancy terms mean lol.. I'm not very tech savvy

[Kaimeta]

holy cow those are awesome!!

But are you saying you'd really like a greyscale from Wolfy to work with or the .ter file type? If that's the case i can help out with someone of this in the way of transferring stuff i think.

[Apogee]

Well I know that campaign cartographer can export files in different formats. I just can't remember whether version 3 can do "terrain" files, they're basically the height maps that say what altitude a map's image is.

This is what I see when I'm working with terragen



The map shows the blue as water level, and the whiter the other areas are, the 'higher' they are on the render. You can set the water level to whatever you want, also the angle of the sun and whatnot.

But the terrain file, up in the right side box, that's what I wonder is possible to export from cc3. Sometimes you see it say "export file as", otherwise it would be "save as" something - in this case, a .ter file.

But I do tons of maps like this anyway, even without a file I can always take a screenshot and mess with it. The program has a way of importing plain old bitmap images, so I have used greyscale pictures and made maps out of them. It doesn't work terrifically well, but it still *works*.

[Tidemist]

woooooah Apogee, those look so amazing!! so realistic....*stare*...okay i forgive you for not being active the past couple days!:p i honestly don't understand all the tech jumbo, but yeah, wolfy has been working with us to get at least a basic map of the coast line. we are hoping later to do a more detailed greyscale map to show High Cove and the tunnels inside and such.

[Apogee]

Yup I can do surfaces and such if I know approximately what the outline and the features are like. I can actually go in on a greyscale image and make manual adjustments, but what I can't do is make things like overhangs or items with space under them. This is a top-down height map, at least in my version of Terragen. I think the further - paid - version of the program does have some more interesting methods of making the terrains, but I don't have money for that.

Plus I can also just *edit* them,

http://lethe-gray.deviantart.com/art/RosePetal-Weyr-take-1-82682556

That's got two images put together and then added a little waterfall action. But since you can adjust the water level, one image had the high water for the lake, and another was without it. Since they were taken from the same exact angle, I didn't need to do much more than erase the part I didn't need on one image.

Getting the ground colors right is still a little hard, because there are mysteries about whether the order in which the layers are listed makes any difference. Pretty sure it does, but I haven't quite figured it out. It's a fun program, also free, because it's on a much later version now out in the wild.

[Delhya]

WOW SOOOO COOOOL!!!

[WolfCandy]

wow. that is just awesome @ @
O
I don't understand how you can do all these fancy things without beong confused to death :O And I don't think I can do the .ter maps, but I'm pretty sure I can greyscale it

[Ember Robinwood]

They look so cool! Absolutely amazing!

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