Terragen is the software that many artists turn to when they want to render beautifully realistic landscapes, skies or other natural environments. It’s used to create blockbuster movies such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, TV shows, games, VR environments, museum exhibits, documentaries, and much more.
Generally speaking, it’s a landscape generator designed to render micropolygon displacements. It’s driven by a layer-based system, which allows you to drive fractal functions with various shaders. So, for instance, you can have a fractal node generating the landscape, with a displacement shader adding specific details. Then the colour can be derived from another node, and masked by a shader driven by slope or altitude – which in turn can be driven by another node – and so on.
Currently, the prices for Terragen 4 stand at $349 for Terragen Creative and $699 for Terragen Professional. However, Planetside (the company behind Terragen) offers an educational license that allows you to acquire Terragen Creative for free given that you can prove that you’re a student.
The Terragen Education Licence doesn’t come with any sort of tutorial or guide on how to use the software, therefore, I was left to figure out the basics by myself. Below is a basic overview and my understanding of each of the functions.
Nick is a German urban landscape photography who has studios located in Munich and has also worked with some of the largest companies in the world such as; Apple, Adobe and Canon. Furthermore, Nick has also been awarded with numbers of awards throughout his carrier.
Nick was responsible for the visual presentation of advertising campaigns over many years in advertising agencies, he then he changed to express his ideas in his own pictures.
His photographs can be found in numerous announcements today. For example; news magazines like Spiegel, Wired or New York Times and highly regarded newspapers like SZ. His requests from global cities like Vienna, Paris and so on are showing his strength in his images.
Examples of Nick’s work
Photo analysis
This coloured landscape photograph is of a pink building called the La Muralla Roja. This photography has clearly only been taken with natural lighting as you can see the multiple shadows that have been created from the abstract building. There is a strong contrast in this image between the pink building and the pale blue sky. The use of this strong contrast really allows the building to project its abstract shapes. Furthermore, the green tree creates a sense of juxtaposition as it also creates a strong contrast between the man made structure and the natural structure within this image. This is because there is very little natural structures compared to the large amount of man made structures. The multiple shapes within this building creates a sense of depth as it create an almost maze feeling to the image as you could imagine getting lost among all the sharp and abstract shapes. Overall, the way Nick has captured this abstract image allows the viewers to visualise it in such a way which results in this image being very aesthetically pleasing to look at.
