Welcome to Digital landscapes, a collection of pages dedicated to the creation of spectacular landscapes and animations. There is nothing very technical in making an animated landscape from a software. All that is required is a powerful computer to render the high resolution frames and animations, a collection of free software, and lots of free time.

Before commencing upon the use of these free software, it is better to understand some basic concepts.

Artificial landscapes are generated from a special type of graphics data termed as Hieghtfield data or DEM. The term hieghtfield is more popular in the animation world while DEM is a more scientific term used mainly in the GIS world. The hieghtfield data is analogous to the familiar digital images we see on our PC.  The only difference is that the brightness and colour of each pixel in this data represents a particular height or elevation value, instead of the surface reflectance values characteristic of the common images. The software creates a surface using these elevation values.  Terrain files (hieghtfields) can be created by different methods (algorithms).  The most realistic methods for the generation of terrains are fractal based, that introduce scale-invariant random roughness into the terrain. Some of these methods are: perlin noise, multi perlin, ridged perlin, subdivide and displace etc. DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) are terrain files that represent real world data. DEMs are derived by the manual or automated extraction of elevation from stereo pairs of aerial photographs, optical images and radar images from satellites and space shuttles. Alternatively, DEMs can also be interpolated using the contour line data available in topographic maps.  DEMs can  be downloaded free from the internet and imported into the software for rendering.

After the creation of terrain files, most of the software need a surface file, which imparts to the terrain a particular texture for better visualization. The surface may be a bitmap (any image) or it may be something more complex (fractal surfaces) as in Terragen.  Additionally, an atmosphere file (for sky, clouds, sun conditions) may also be needed.  The surface and atmosphere files are created by many terrain rendering software, but the conflict of file format is an ever-present irritation. In the newer version of Terragen (TG2) and some standard software, it is also possible to place 3D objects (created in other animation software) upon the terrain surface and include them in the rendering processes. These objects include houses, roads, trees, and many more depending upon the creator. TG2 gives a fairly good support to many 3D object formats. It should be clear that the term RENDERING refers to the process of generating a still image (a photograph) by setting our virtual camera in the virtual world at a fixed  location. This image is derived by combining the data of the terrain file with the parameters set for surface and atmosphere and water. A lot of calculations are involved behind the manifestation of the effects of these parameters on the terrain data and this is in itself a vast field spanning many disciplines.

World Machine is powerful terrain manipulation software that can build, import and shape terrains to appear highly realistic. The basic edition (latest is WM 1.25) is available free for download (click here). The user guide provided with the software is an ideal tutorial  for the beginners, so it is better to go through that first.  But remember that World Machine is a software that creates new terrain files and edits existing terrain files, it does not render the terrains into picturesque landscapes.  This job is very effectively done by another powerful software —Terragen ( click here to download the free version— V 0.9.43) that can create terrain files (though not as efficiently as World Machine) as well as impart different textures (surfaces) and different atmospheric conditions to the terrain. The result is a landscape so realistic u won’t believe yourself, although after sometime you will be fed up of that and crave for more realism in your landscapes. As for now, I’ve not yet laid my hands upon the newer version (TG2).

Virtual Terrain Project (VTP) is a remarkable work headed by Ben Discoe with a goal to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form. Here, u can find a comprehensive overview and links to each and everything related to the virtual terrain modeling and visualization. Visit the VTP homepage and you’ll be exposed to a systematic library of links and tutorials. In fact, I got to know a lot from this site. The VTP software (actually a set of a few interrelated software) is available free upon request (click here). I’ve not worked much on it yet.

You may probably also wish to visualize a real world location using Terragen. The best source of real world elevation data free of cost is SRTM. SRTM stands for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, an 11 day mission undertaken by NASA during Feb. 2000 to gather the topographic data of the planet from a space shuttle, at resolution of 30 meters. However, to the general public, the available resolution is 90 meters. Click here to go to SRTM download page.

The DEM can be downloaded as 5*5 degree tiles (geoTIFF and Arc ASCII formats) and 1*1 degree tiles  (Arc ASCII format). For cutting desired portions of the DEM for importing into World Machine or Terragen, another small software comes in very handy— 3DEM (click here to download)   

Finally, a word of caution :

Things are not that easy, thanks to the complications introduced by the  proliferation of image and DEM/hieghtfield data formats.  Very often, you might be caught up in file format incompatibilities, and you’ll resort to some intermediate software that will  overcome the format problem. But all this becomes too complicated and irritating and you need to spare some time for that. So try to be cool in those trying circumstances.