Coming Home

I posted this over at the planetside forums here and got some great feedback. Unfortunately, I'm struggling with the motivation to try some of the suggestions to finish it off...far more interesting to start something new!? So here it is - chances are it's going to stay as it is.

The Day After Tomorrow

I did this for the 'Objects in Terragen 2' theme over on the Google Terragen Group. It seemed like a good idea but I'm not sure if I've quite pulled it off!?

Maya Pyramid

My first Blender object of my own. I've uploaded the OBJ file to Terranuts. Help yourself to it here...but remember it is my first one :-)

Moonlit Cliffs

This is the T2 version of 'Snow Cliffs'. The moonlit cliffs are simply the base colours layer with both high & low colour turned off and a reflective shader placed straight after it. PaintShop Pro post-work mostly to try and bring out the 'moonglow mood'!

The Speaking Ring

Another Dark Tower inspired one...I hope this isn't becoming an obsession :-)

I used this tutorial as a starting point for the tower. The stones in 'the speaking ring' are from a 3D object I got from here.

Rocky River

My entry for the Google Terragen Group's October T2 competition. The theme was "do absolutely whatever you want, just use fake stones shaders".

The group has 2 competitions every month (one for Terragen v0.9 and one for Terragen v2). It's pretty laid back though...it's all about having fun and sharing what you're doing. And they're looking for new members...why not take a look and if you feel like joining in just go for it :-)

The Blender of the North

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!

Dark Tower

I was tempted to do some post-work on this to make the tower into more of a "fantasy architecture" type thing...but I bottled because I'm not that confident with image manipulation. Seeing as there's no post-work been done I might put it in for the Google Terragen Group's featured artist of the month.

Wood Land

More playing around with different shaders. There's a twist and shear shader, several fake stones shaders, and an image map shader!

Black Mountain

I made the terrain using the twist and shear shader and the redirect shader in Terragen 2.

First Terragen 2

Finally got round to downloading Terragen 2 and went through the steps in the quick start. It crashes during rendering when my screensaver kicks in, but I turned off the screensaver (and other power saving, to be sure) and it rendered fine. Anybody else had this?