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Terragen is a work-in-progress scenery generator for Windows 95/98/NT/2000. At this stage of its development, Terragen is free for personal non-commercial use, although one can register for a fee and gain access to certain enhancements. It is presently in beta, and seems likely to stay that way for some time, as the creator, Matt Fairclough, can only develop it in his spare time. It can produce, from a very intuitive interface, images of terrains that look indistinguishable from photographs.
Matt's Terragen site is at http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/ and there are a lot of other sites scattered over the Web devoted to it. See http://www.terragen.de/links.htm for an exhaustive list. A very active discussion group is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/terragen.
Here's a screenshot of Terragen's interface. Whilst it may look complicated at first glance, it's fairly easy to understand. Click on the picture below for a full-sized version (warning - 149KB file).
The galleries contain a few of my attempts at creating landscapes with Terragen. I only discovered Terragen a short while ago and can't pretend to any expertise with the program, or any artistic merit in the graphics I created.
There appear to be two camps among the users of Terragen: those who render the file and then regard that as the finished article, and those who process the image in a program such as PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro afterwards (described as 'post-processing'). The former appear to regard the latter as some sort of heretics, but I do tend to clean up my images in an image editor afterwards. I have also tried adding trees and other 'extras' to landscapes; so far I've not been very happy with the results.
