The Ray Traced Landscape

One of the things that started to change my perception of the computer based architectural model was my discovery of landscape rendering in the first iteration of Terragen. For those who don't know, it is a landscape and atmosphere modelling program that uses ray tracing to generate surprisingly realistic results from procedural algorithms.  It relied heavily on plugins written by users for everything from importing bitmaps to wave generation in water, but it was a robust program and happily supported by the community of users.

The next version, Terragen 2, was able to incorporate larger DEM data with fractal tweaks to generate even more textured landscapes.  It could also import meshes, plants, and objects in TGO or OBJ formats from other programmes such as XFrog and World Machine.  Most of the plugins in Terragen were included as standard features in Terragen 2, and the new node based interface meant that even more complex materials and complex terrains were possible.

Raytracing is frighteningly processor and time intensive.  It is just what it says; a myriad of points are calculated one by one against the rays of light from the source of illumination and mixed with global illumination; the light glow from each one of those points.  But if you have the patience and the computing power, the end results are fantastic.  Terragen 2 was able to make use of multiple cores and threads for a significant speed upgrade over Terrgen. The newest version, Terragen 3 has further evolved, with significant improvements to rendering speeds, and rendering of landscape and atmospheric effects.  It also allows network based rendering to share a rendering task across multiple computers.

It's still a wait for some things though, particularly if you want stellar lighting and atmospheric effects.  Start that renderer, make some coffee, and perhaps a meal, and watch the magic appear line by line.

2010 - combination of procedural landscape and World Machine landscape rendered in Terragen 0.9

2011 - a DEM mesh of Mitten Buttes Arizona rendered in the beta version of Terragen 2

2012 - a DEM mesh of Mount Assiniboine Alberta rendered in the final version of Terragen 2

2013 - procedural space landscape for book cover - rendered in the final version of Terragen 2

all images in this blog are copyright vertigo studios and michael knudsen