Terragen is currently free software for non-commercial use. Possibly the simplest and most versatile free software of its kind. General use and possibilities, recommended add-ons, and more.

This page has LOTS of images - about 50, to guide you through step by step in creating your first landscape. It will take some time for them to download, so please be patient.

Unlike some landscape generation programs, Terragen does not require you to have a Terrain file to load into it. It is capable of generating random terrain, which means you can download the software and start playing with it, without having to have any technical knowledge or other downloaded items.

This program is not particularly EASY to learn, but it is simpler to use than many of the similar programs. With basic instructions, you can open the program for the first time, play with some controls, and end up with a landscape, surface, and sky. All in a matter of minutes. My husband can create a reasonable image in about 15-20 minutes. It can take me an hour, but I do things that are a bit more complex. The kids can do one in 10 to 15 minutes. The 17 year old can do them himself. The 14 year old needs occasional instruction. The 10 and 11 year olds can do them with help. The 8 year old likes to stand beside Mom or Dad and tell us what he likes the look of.

Terragen is perfect for people who enjoy playing with a program to see what it can do, and who have a desire to be creative. Results can be unexpected at times, so you have to enjoy experimentation to really appreciate using it. You CAN produce a good image right away, but to get a certain look, you'll have to try out the controls and see what they do. We'll cover a basic overview here, but there is so much more that you can do, you'll want to try out different things than just what I show you.

So, lets open 'er up and see what we can do on a test drive!

Your initial screen is not much to look at, and the menus don't offer much help either. Those buttons down the left side though, will be of some use to you!

First, click on the Rendering Controls - first button at the top. That window will pretty much stay open, because it has a nifty little preview option, which we will use to check our results.

You'll also want to open the Landscape Control, as shown. This is where the real work will begin. Terragen has the ability to import terrain maps from other sources, but this time we are going to create our own.

To really work well, you might want to move the windows side by side so you can see both well. Then click the Generate Terrain button.

That gets you yet another window. It has some options. You can play around with the Methods, and with the other features later. for now, just leave everything set on the defaults, but move the Size of Features slider to the right a bit.

Then click the Generate Terrain button in that dialog box. When you do, you'll see the terrain appear in the Landscape window, as shown. The white areas are the higher spots, the dark areas are the lower ones. You want to look for a nice layout where you think you can get a good camera shot across to make a pleasing image. I decided to work with the one here.

If I had not liked it, I could keep clicking the Generate Terrain button, and playing with the settings, until I got an appearance that I liked. The different sliders control different features. To learn what they do, slide them all to the left. Click Generate Terrain. Then slide just one all the way to the right, and generate again. Slide that one back, and try another. Once you know what effect each one has, you can work with them in combination to get the features you want.

Once you get what you want, click the Close button, and go back to your previous two controls. Click the Open button under Surface Map. Look through your Terragen folders to see if there are some sample surface maps included - generally there are (these will be different for PC and Mac versions). Surface Maps have a file extension of .srf. Find one that has light or heavy snow, or snowy mountains, or something like that, and open it.

Right now the surface is not particularly important, we are just trying to get some ground cover to keep your image from being all gray rock. The surfaces are colors and textures that build up on top of that gray rock to give the landscape some character. We just want something to slap down so you can learn the other controls.

Next we'll mess with the camera. The camera takes a shot of the landscape like a real camera. You have to pay attention to what is in front of it, and what the angles are. I chose to drag the camera itself (the arrow is pointing at it), to the top of a hill surrounding a dip in the land.

Next I used the RIGHT mouse button to drag the camera target (where you want the camera to point to), into a little lower area, on the other side of the depression. The camera target is the end of the center of the three lines pointing from the camera.

Next we will set a render control so we can get a shot of what we have so far. We have made terrain, applied a surface, and set up the camera, but everything else is on defaults.

I set the render control to the setting shown. This is high, but not the highest quality preview. It takes longer for better quality, but it also allows you to really see what it is that you are creating, so the time is worth it.

Here is what we have. Not bad, but not real impressive either. As you can see, the center camera line goes right across a little bit of a hill, so you see a hill in the foreground of the picture. You can lso see that the image is rather blocky, because we do not have it on the best render setting.

I then turned up the render setting so you can see the difference. It is much smoother. The finished image will be better still - the Preview does not show top quality no matter how high you set it. The Detail setting applies to both the Preview and the Final Image though, so remember to set it where you want it before you do the final render later.

I wanted to add some water, so I opened the Water control. The water defaults to -300 meters. Since we have no water in our terrain, we'll have to raise that level until we get water. I usually raise it by 100 or 200 meters at a time, and then adjust.

At 100 meters, we have a lot of water. I want just a little less, so I will play with the numbers.

20 meters looks about right from the top of the terrain. I can set wave properties (in the image above), and Reflections (below). I am going to turn the Reflection spread up a bit, because I want the water to glow a bit more than usual.

In the Sub-surface tab, I can set the water color. I am going to leave it as it is, because I want a basic water appearance.

In the Shore tab, I can set how much wave action I want on the shoreline. There is also a box below where I can choose a Plug-in if I have one (there are some available for download - we like WaterWorks and a few others).

When I rendered it in the Preview window, it is now possible to see the water, and the sun reflection.

I do want a bit more water to show though, so I am going to change the camera position just a bit. You'll need to do this as you work with your image, in order to get the appearance you want.

Now I have a good patch of water, with a bright sun glow. The sun is actually TOO bright, and I will need to change the position and colors of the sky next.

The cloud control allows you to set the size of the clouds, and how much light they filter out. You can also increase their depth, and choose whether you want them to render in 3-D or not. I am not going to mess with them much, because I like the thin hazy appearance of the sky - Very Wyomingesque, and I'll add some other effects to make it more so.

In order to do that, I clicked the Atmosphere control button. This panel allows you some very creative effects. The first thing I'll do is Edit the color of the Simple Haze.

I want it just a tad pinker and bluer. The sliders allow you to control the colors. I am keeping them somewhat understated because I am going to add some other effects that will intensify them.

Next I edit the Atmospheric Blue. I want that just a little bit bluer, so I adjust the middle slider a little to the left to go darker. Again, I am keeping the changes small.

The last color setting is for the Redden Decay color. This controls how the colors change at sunset and sunrise. I want it just a tiny bit pinker.

The last thing I'll set in here is the Light Decay setting. I am turning it up just a bit. That will intensify sunset effects. You can play with the other sliders to get other sky effects.

When I render the preview, you can se that the sky color is just a bit more intense, with just a little more pink around the sun.

I want the sun moved to a different location. I opened the Lighting Conditions panel, and moved some things around.

The sun level was dragged downward a little.

And I moved the sun position to the left a bit, because I wanted it to the left of center in my image.

It may help to move the Lighting box beside the Render controls so that you can see the sun position relative to the camera position. As you can see, my camera is pointing to the left, so I wanted the sun angle to be left of that.

Then I turned down the strength of the sunlight, more fitting to later in the day. The other tabs in the Lighting box allow you to set the size of the sun, and other atmosphere and lighting effects.

Now when I render the image, I get a totally different appearance. The sun is less dominant, and the water does not shine quite so bright.

I tried moving the position of the sun, hoping I could get it to shine through a gap in the mountains, but it did not work well, and I put it back to what it was before.

The angle ended up slightly different than it was previously, and I got a nice glow on the water. This is an image worth keeping, so it is time to render the full sized image.

I now have to set the Render Settings for the final image.

Under Quality, I set the Atmostphere quality to High.

Next I clicked the Options button, but I did not change anything here.

Under the Image tab, I set the size of the image that I wanted. I chose the size I did so that it would fit my screen for a desktop background.

Under the last setting, I increased the size of the buffers - do not do this unless you have plenty of memory in your computer. Leave it on the default if you don't understand what this is and how much RAM you can use for it.

Close that control, and go back to the Render Control. Click Render Image.

Another window will pop up and you'll see chunks of the image start to appear. This is about a minute or so into the render.

After the land appears, the sky will start to block in.

This image has been scaled down, and you cannot see the details too well, but if you look along the side of the mountain on the left side, where it meets the sky, you can see some jagged edges. The image is being blocked in, but it is still sort of rough in places.

When the image is finished, it smooths out, and you have the final picture. This took a total of about 15-20 minutes to do, and I was taking screen shots as I went. I can click the Save button to save the image to my hard drive.

Now, a little more about surfaces.

You can see in the final image that the surface has different parts. It has some white, and some green. Each different part is contained in a surface item in the surface map. The one below has three surfaces, and two sub-surfaces (called children). This allows you to layer different textures on the surface and to control where the different colors go.

If you double click a surface, you'll get a control for it. You can set the bumpiness, and whether it hugs the terrain or not, as well as the general colors. Under Advanced Distribution, you can set how much of it you want to create, and how it is colorized.

You can set altitude constraints - so that your grass won't grow up high, or so that your snow dribbles out lower down. Sharp means it will stop at a sharp line, fuzzy means it will sort of scatter out. The slope constraints allow you to put certain colors - representative of certain types of plants or ground covers, only on flat ground, or only on slopes.

Another thing you can play with is the camera height. You can set it to take a picture from above the terrain, looking down on it. This has some peculiarities though. Here I just set the camera itself 2000 feet higher than the default.

And this is what I got. The black strips mean that the camera is shooting over the edge of the terrain block. So I moved the camera target position to compensate.

I ended up setting the target position in the middle of the lake to get it low enough to get rid of the incomplete sky and land.

That produced a VERY dark image, so I raised the sun level up higher to compensate. This was the end result.

Terragen is perhaps one of the most enjoyable programs we have used. The kids enjoy using it, and so does my husband. His nature and mine are quite different, yet both of us like this. I think he likes it because it allows him to create artistic works without having artistic skills. I like it because it allows me to produce artistic works faster than painting them. I sometimes port them into my image editing program and retouch them also.

Play around with it, and see what you can do. You can't hurt anything by messing with it, you'll just learn what things do.