Apologies in advance if this is a repeat topic…I was doing some research on terrain generators for the Mac and came across a few. Has anyone had any experience with them and what are your thoughts? For terrains, how big is too big? Which ones did I miss, what are your thoughts on those?
Vue
Natural Scene Designer
http://naturalgfx.com/products.htm
Terragen
I’m wrestling with this right now. I’ve learned Vue and think it’s an amazing application for “scenes,” but it’s not as good for what I want, which is a much larger view, like on a map, for a player to wander around in. For this, I think something like Mojoworld might be best.
I don’t know about geometric complexity, but if you’re pre-rendering like me Vue is incredible because of its ecosystem technology.
Which version of Vue are you using?
Vue 5 Infinite. If you were just looking for something to generate geometry for your game, however, it might be overindulgent.
Wow, Mojoworld looks really impressive. I’ll definitely keep it in mind, thanks.
Pavlov-
Hey man, I would personally steer you away from Vue, unless you are generating a skybox. When I’ve exported .obj files from vue and imported them to maya, they are usually over simplified and sometimes just a flat plane. It just dosent work. The geometry is gone, and it happens to other people too. I use Bryce, its terrain editor is a lot of fun.If you are interested to see what a single terrain mesh of Bryce looks like, download my demo of the temple, the lightings averagly terrible so play it at night :shock:
http://forum.otee.dk/viewtopic.php?t=1938
Just took a look through Daz’s web site and Bryce looks pretty complete but it didn’t provide very much in depth detail on what it can do.
I didn’t see anything about an .fbx exporter, is it possible to create a character in Bryce and import it into Unity, bones and all?
The words “character creation” and 'Bryce" mix like oil and water. Bryce is a terrain/scene creator and it does that pretty well, but anything beyond simple robot characters in Bryce isn’t possible. Bryce feels very dated these days, it was awesome several years ago, but not much has changed and its sleek GUI seems more of a hindrance than a breakthrough these days. Bryce is still nice for organic scene creation, but it needs to be coupled with another 3D program to really be useful.
Thats right, Bryce will not serve you at all as a character designer, Its purely for exporting mesh’es. Well its actually for rendering AVI’s etc but if you want to export terrains, you can only do one mesh at a time, not a group. For me it serves one purpose(Terrain Generation) and does it really well. I have not used Terragen-Anyone else?
Bryce exports to 3Ds, dxf, obj, and a few others, not fbx
Problem with Bryce’s terrain generator is that it’s heightmap centric which means no overhangs. Also I don’t think it optimizes the mesh at all.
I’ve had good results with using “Select Random” and proportional editing in Blender on a subdivided plane. Then run it through a decimator filter and do a quick UV map and you’re done.
-Jon
Might you want to do a tutorial on this one? 
Oh and one more thing… In bryce it is really annoying when exporting you get to choose the file type for the materials (textures) and it saves them with no file extension. Is there a way to turn this on?
Also I get all sorts of maps as the resut of the export and besides the fact that I only need maybe two of them, the bump map really looks terrible when applied to the mesh in unity… any hints on this one?
I agree, the Bryce texture maps arent that hot. Im gonna try and sus that so watch this space
Anyone wanna give a woop woop for terragen? Its on my “to try” list
I’ll give it a single woop for it’s skybox generator 
I’ve been watching this thread hoping to learn about some cool new terrain generating apps. I’ll “ditto” the thumbs up for Terragen for skybox generation, and although it’s terrain generation is very good, it’s not easy to bring into a game engine.
The best options I’ve found so far are, unfortunately, not Mac-based:
L3DT ( http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ ) is free (for now, soon to be $25) and does a very nice job creating large area terrains.
PnP Terrain Creator ( http://pnp-terraincreator.com/index.php ) looks really cool, and the price looks reasonable although I haven’t tried it.
As a side note, I’ve done terrains with Carrara Pro (availabe for OSX Windose). Carrara, if you’ve never worked with it, is an excellent general purpose modeling / animation app and has terrain / sky tools similar to Vue. The problem is getting these images / models out of Carrara and into a game, as Carrara seems almost exclusively designed for print or film production.
Hope this info is helpful…
this might fit in here…
i’ve been having a lot of fun using height map data to recreate actual terrains. i had my students make 3D maps of their home towns at the beginning of our maya/3D animation course here at st. olaf.
i also made a short .pdf tutorial (for macs) on getting elevation data off the USGS website and converting it into grayscale heightmaps for displacement in maya. all thanks to a little program called landserf.
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/kelleyp/coursecommon/mayatutorials/pdf/USGSmaps_to_maya.pdf
one thing this tutorial leaves out (which i’ll add shortly) is that one should download the aerial photo imagery at the same time if you want it to match perfectly with the terrain; also, most of this data gives you non-orthographic imagery, i.e. it will seem squished in the north-south dimension. of course this can be remedied pretty easily in photoshop.
i’m no pro, just an art prof :? if you find errors in this, please let me know.
also, there’s the shuttle radar topography mission imagery as well, a global height-map database. very cool stuff:
http://srtm.usgs.gov/index.html
the srtm data for the US is actually included in the USGS site (tutorial above), but you can use this site to get data for other countries. landserf also converts the .hgt files!
theres been some good stuff about terrain genertors goin on here, so keep it comin. Terragen didnt work on my PC so I will try another download. THe maya/landserf one still beckons…Sound promising.
As far as cleaning up the texture maps in bryce, I just figured if you go to the materials section/simple and fast/there you can find an emulation of the colour gradient options found within the terrain generator. Some of the other texture maps may be lame, but if its your current generator of choice, trial and error is the key
AC
My terain generation workflow is as follows. I create a hight map (black and white) in photoshop, I then import this into bryce and play with it a little to get it exactly how I want. I then export from bryce at a target tri count. I then import this mesh into Maya or Body Paint and proced to UV map it. Texturing comes next with terain I often use the paint tools in my 3D app and then do tuch up in PhotoShop, it works decently well, Open Fire www.bluegillflame.com/en/games.html is an example of this workflow. I also baked the lighting into my texture right before importing into Unity.[/url]
For users of Maya, 3D Studio Max, Soft Image XSI and indeed Lightwave, you might be interested in checking out the Wavgen Pro software. This software allows the user to load, model and render enormous UV maps and textures, with 100% third party tools, plug-ins and render engine support.
With my experience of this software, I was able to animate extremely high quality resolutions of the digital earth - it was extremely efficient and seamless. Wavgen Pro provided me with tons of geodata, satellite and aerial data. It was awesome!
Definitely worth checking out for users of higher end software - www.wavgen.com