I've started learning Blender so I can make my own 3D models to combine with my Terragen landscapes. This is my first blender model in a terragen landscape. The model reminded me a bit of the Angel of the North...so that's where the title came from :-)
Here are some notes on what I learnt exporting the model from Blender and bringing it into Terragen...
Creating the model: I followed this beginner's tutorial here
Exporting from Blender: Was fairly straightforward. I exported as a wavefront (.obj) file. You get quite a lot of options so I was expecting a bit of trial & error to get the object out how I wanted it, but just accepting the defaults seemed to work fine. (Except that the first time I got an obj file with no object in it...but that was because the "Selection only" option is on by default and I didn't have my object selected!)
Saving the file in Poseray: If I just added the object straight out of Blender into Terragen then it crashed when rendering. But I found that opening it in Poseray and saving it again worked fine. Oh, and I also carried out the two steps that I found in this forum post.
Positioning the object in Terragen: I mucked about for ages trying to get the model to stand on the mountain...rather than floating above it or buried half-way into it! The way I did it eventually was to add the object as a population - setting the size of the population rectangle and object spacing such that there'll only be a single object in the population. This way I was able to position it where I wanted it in the X & Y co-ordinates, and the Z co-ordinate was automatically positioned so that the object would stand on the ground. Phew! There's more details on adding an object population here.
UPDATE: A fellow member of the Google Terragen Group has posted some screenshots here showing the method he uses to place a single object in Terragen. Thanks dandelO!
