Y.A.T.S.

I got it for free at http://come.to
Yet Another Terragen Site

Yep, it's another Terragen website.

But now we've finally got a scriptable version of the program, I felt I had to. And in case some random people who've happened upon this place by chance are wondering what Terragen is, well, it's a very very good landscape generation program for the PC (and one day the Mac) by Matt Fairclough. It's a work in progress, ultimately leading to a commercial product cryptically entitled 'Terragen-D'. But fortunately for us, the alpha/beta incarnation (currently 0.6.61 as of 26th May 1999) is freeware. Matt has a website at Planetside. Note - this is the new style URL that York University is introducing; the old will stop working sometime soon. How do I know? Well, I'm also at York University, studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics (as well as the martial art of Samurai Jiu Jitsu) but enough about me.

Just to show what Terragen is capable of, here's a 320 x 200 picture it rendered with just the default settings (apart from putting the detail to high) in only 3 minutes 27 seconds on a P133 with 16Mb RAM (my computer, in other words). Pretty impressive!

Then of course, if you raise the water level, move the sun around, and change the atmospheric settings a bit, you can get something like this in 3 minutes 46 seconds .....

** The newest version (0.6.61) has increased rendering speed by 20%, so the times above will be a lot less **

If you go to the links page or the webring, you'll be able to find some far better examples of the versatility and power of Terragen.

As I said above, there is now a scriptable version of Terragen out. That can mean only one thing - animations! This perfect for those elapsed time sort of movies you see on TV nature shows, where the clouds zoom by as the sun rises. Here's one I made like this.

More animations I've created are available from the Animations page. I've done more, but as they weren't that good or worthwhile there's only eleven up. Something I did create some time ago was a Stick Figure Death Theatre animation that you can view here called Shot Down.

The only problem after you've rendered all the individual frames is how to create a movie, what format to use (such as QuickTime, RealMedia, AVI, MPEG, Bink), which codec to use, maybe even what's a codec. Well, not to worry, cos I've written a page that (I hope) explains it all, with links to (free) software. Go to the Lights, Camera ... page.

If you want info on how to best set up a movie and create the individual frames, the Official User Guide is a good start, and Carol Brooksbank's excellent and comprehensive tutorial is best for individual compositions. Terragen comes with a basic script writer, but for anything more complicated, you will need either (or both) Terranim by Daniel Parnham or Camera Path Editor by Sean O'Malley.

Here's some links to other relevant sites:

..... ..... ..... .....

Terragen Frequently Asked Questions
Terragen Links at TerraNet
Terragen Mailing List
Terragen Official User Guide
TerraCon competition

And for those with JavaScript enabled who are wondering how I created the popup captions, I used the code written by Erik Bosup. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you've either not got JavaScript or the code isn't working (again!).

Just to show what Terragen is capable of, here's a 320 x 200 picture it rendered with just the default settings (apart from putting the detail to high) in only 3 minutes 27 seconds on a P133 with 16Mb RAM (my computer, in other words). Pretty impressive!
Then of course, if you raise the water level, move the sun around, and change the atmospheric settings a bit, you can get something like this in 3 minutes 46 seconds .....
The newest version (0.6.61) has increased rendering speed by 20%, so the times above will be a lot less

Here's some links to other relevant sites:
.....	.....	.....	.....	Terragen Frequently Asked Questions Terragen Links at TerraNet Terragen Mailing List Terragen Official User Guide TerraCon competition