Technical Notes on the Landscapes of Oedloor

With one exception, the pictures on this site were rendered from two Terragen terrains. The exception is the map of Oedloor, which was originally painted in acrylics, then recreated in Paint Shop Pro by hand.

The size of both Terragen terrains is 1025 x 1025. To create the terrains, I sculpted the basic foundations with Terragen's native sculpting tools, exported them as bitmaps using the For Export Only plug-in, did fine sculpting in Paint Shop Pro and finally used WorldMachine's erosion tools, not only to add realism but to smooth out errors that produced unwanted "terracing" effects in the bitmap export/import process. The scale of the Prawahalla Valley terrain is 48 kilometers on a side. The scale of the Color Island terrain is 40 kilometers on a side. Scales of this size limit the amount and quality of detail in close-ups, but my primary intent to was achieve sweeping landscapes with large distances.

Most pictures were rendered at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels to capture detail, then resized. I tried to keep post-processing to a minimum, consisting mostly of using the unsharpen tool to enhance detail, smoothing sharp edges in foreground terrain and filling in holes in the horizon where the sky didn't quite make it to the landscape, which sometimes happened at higher-altitude vantage points.

Because Terragen does not render objects such as trees and buildings, no attempt was made to include them. Forested areas look passably real from a distance but start to look like green chunky mud up close, and the detail inevitably breaks down when zooming in on small areas, so I have kept most of the renderings at a distance. I created larger versions of both terrains (2049 x 2409) to improve detail in close-up renderings, but for most purposes the enormously increased rendering time was not worth the extra detail.

The Prawahalla Valley terrain uses five primary surface map layers and seven child layers. One RGB image overlay is used to create the field pattern for farmland, and surface distribution image overlays are used for defining the location of pasture and forested areas. The Color Island terrain uses six primary surface map layers and one child surface map layer, and does not use any surface distribution images. Both terrains use the SortaSurf feature of the WaterWorks plug-in to create surf, and a mask to block its effects in protected waters.

Terrain and surface files

These zip files include the terrains, world files and overlays used in these renderings.

• Prawahalla (1.9 MB)
• Color Island (1.1 MB)

Robin C. Chapman
May 2003