Building Sky Boxes and Shadow Maps in Terragen

     Terragen is an affordable terrain / environment renderer similar to Bryce, but much more affordable. Is is available as shareware for non commercial use and is only priced at $80. One thing that it needs though is the FEO plugin that allows the exporting of bitmaps from Terragen. This feature will also allow you to make the terrain heightmap in Terragen as well.

    To begin, create the skybox and terrain in terragen. Then select to only render the sky and not the land. Position the camera at a height of 0 and an x y of 3840. The target should be 3840 and 7680. The camera fov needs to be set to 1. Basically the camera is looking at the distance with a 90 degree field of view.

     Now render the scene, adding 90 degrees to the rotation with each render and then finally looking upward with a pan of 0 degrees. This should create five textures. To use these as Sky Box textures, a solid color skyline needs to be added to each. This should be the same color as the in game fog. Also, the front facing image, needs to be flipped both horizontally and vertically.

     Before quitting terragen though, it is also possible to render a shadow map for the terrain. Set the camera height in Terragen to be 3840 units above the ground and facing the ground as well. Set the rendering options to render the land and not the sky. Be sure that the terrain is greyscale and not with any added foliage features. The resulting render image can be used as a shadow map for the terrain.

     All that needs to be remembered about this method is to set the image dimensions to be square and a power of 2. 512 x 512 is a good choice.