HOW can I create a realistic Mountain In terragen 4?

Pietro Chiovaro replies

Terragen 4 (planetside.co.uk) is arguably one of the best pieces of software currently available for the easy creation of realistic CG scenery. Today I will show you how to create a simple environment like the above in just 25 minutes.

First of all, at the beginning of the creation of a new environment, we have to delete the default terrain and add a new one. For this scene I selected the Power Fractal option. Once we have done this, we can set a value for the Seed to generate a different terrain.

Now we can set our base colour. To do this, we have to open the Shaders panel (at the right of the Terrain panel), and select the default base colour. We can then fix many values from the panel below. In this case I just changed the main colour, selecting a brownish one.

After that I created two surface layers. In the first one, I selected ‘Limit maximum altitude’ and fixed a value of -125 for the Maximum Altitude option, and chose a greenish colour. In the second surface layer, I selected ‘Limit minimum slope’ and fixed a value of 20.25 for the Minimum Slope Angle. In the latest surface layer, I left the default colour as it was and tweaked the Coverage value. At this point we have to create our lake, and to do that we have to simply create a new Water Object. For this lake, I fixed a water level value of -515.

The next step is to create the clouds and fix the lighting. First of all we have to select the Atmosphere panel, and here we have to add a Cloud layer. For this scene I selected the High-level: Cirrocumulus option. Here I just changed the Coverage value and the Variation value, set to 1.3 and 0.75 respectively.

And finally I fixed the sunlight (in the Lighting panel), decreasing the Heading value to 207 and increasing the Angular Diameter to 2.3.

We have finished the scene creation process, so now you can change the camera position as you prefer, start the rendering process and then watch the final result.