This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with the basic operation of Terragen.
Because Terragen is so flexible, it is possible to render a huge variety of situations, not just limited to Earth. This tutorial will show you how to render a basic moonscape.
Firstly, create a terrain. If you do not know how to do this, see Landscape Dialog.
The moon does not have grass on it, so set the colour of the "Grass" surface completely white. Then set the "Bare" to a shade of grey, I advise at least halfway to white.
Moonscapes can be most effective if the stark shadows usually seen on the moon are obviously visible. To accentuate the shadows, go to the Lighting dialog and set the shadow lightness very low (not zero as this can make for completely black areas where shadows are - and we do want some artistic license!), and set the Effect of Atmosphere to zero (as there is no atmosphere on the moon). You should also set the Glow amount and Glow Power to zero.
The Effect of Atmosphere setting only alters certain elements of the scene, so set all three densities to zero in the Atmosphere dialog.
At this point, the sky is not being rendered - and as by default this is a completely black area, this can often be left this way - unless you want the sun in the scene. If you want to show the sun in the sky, you should create a cloud layer and then set Density Shift to minimum so that the clouds are not rendered. (at this point you can also put Cloud Accuracy to minimum as we won't be needing it).
(unfortunately, all your moon scenes will be without stars. If you want to add stars to your render, you will have to find some way of doing this yourself. There are programs available which will do this.)
![]() |
Using the steps described in this
tutorial, I went from program startup to Render Complete
in under 5 minutes (although the small image size may
have had something to do with that!). The point is, it is easy to generate relatively convincing moonscapes in Terragen with little effort - it just takes some tweaking of settings to make it look better. |
![]() render controls |
![]() landscape |
![]() water |
![]() clouds |
![]() atmosphere |
![]() lighting |
![]() image |
menu items - working
with files - faq - getting started - moonscapes - animations - post-processing
- index ©May, 1999 John McLusky |