Atmosphere Examples

Back to the Atmosphere Dialog.

All these examples are taken from the same location on the same landscape. The only things that change in each scene are the atmospheric settings. This picture shows the scene with the default settings.

In this picture, I used Simple Haze Density of 80% while leaving all other settings intact. This gives a good impression of a foggy day.
Here I used a Simple Haze Density of 72%, and I also lowered the Simple Haze Half-height to 5.7, giving a nice effect of low mist. When viewed from above, using this sort of combination can be used to effectively show low mist from above, although the sky can look "too blue" without the haze acting properly on it.
Be careful of increasing the Atmospheric Blue density too much without compensating with other elements. here, it is set to 40% and even here the sky looks far too light and the whole image has a slightly "ghostly" feel to it.
Here I raised the Light Decay (Reddening) to 50%. This is more exaggerated than would normally be desired, but raising this value slightly can give a little more "warmth" to scenes, especially sunsets. It is too easy to go too far, though.
This is an effect I use quite frequently - I reduced all half-heights to 32. This can give an effect of higher altitude by "thinning" the atmosphere as would happen at high altitude. The rendering of the landscape is not affected very much, but the blue colour of the sky gets much deeper.

The key to maintaining realism in Terragen images is to not go for extreme values of atmospheric settings (or, for that matter, any settings). However, nature does sometimes produce results which are extreme, so perhaps this advice shouldn't be taken too literally... As always, the best way to get the results that you want is to experiment!

Back to the Atmosphere Dialog.



render controls

landscape

water

clouds

atmosphere

lighting

image
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©May, 1999 John McLusky