I’d like to thank davep’s astronomy blog for pointing me to Terragenâ„¢. It’s a program to generate photo-realistic landscapes for Windows and Mac!. I used to muck around with VistaPro in Virtual PC for Mac as it is Windows only (and has an ugly DOS-esque interface). The feature set is very similar but I’m stoked to have a Mac native landscape renderer! Having already been familiar with the concepts from Vista Pro made it very easy to jump right in to Terragen, but I think it would be not too hard to get the hang of anyway.

Although for non-comercial use Terragen can be used for free, I wanted the larger render sizes and the QTVR tools so I plunked down the $99…. erm… ya… thanks Dave! 😛

Here are some scenes I’ve done over the last few days. The initial landscapes are from Terragen and the “special touches” (planets, stars, lens flares, etc) were added in Photoshop CS2. They are not REALLY astro-related but they do have a sci-fi/fantasy kind of theme. Enjoy.

Here are some Vista Pro renders I did a few years ago.

For anyone interested these will probably show up in my next installment of Desktop Images.