Freeware- The cheapskate filmmaker's dream.

I'm hanging out for Terragen 2 actually. I'm sort of hoping that the interface largely remains the same (ie. just as easy to use as the old one was for me) but I'm paranoid they'll invent something with a ludicrous learning curve like Vue or something. I couldn't figure it out at all.

Yep - really hoping that it will be like the old one, but with whole planets instead of small squares of land.

 

I am looking forward to that one as well - I tried to get in on some of the early testing but they had all the testers they needed once I arrived. Hopefully one of these days I'll be able to finally give it a go!

 

I can't believe i haven't found blender before now.

 

I don't know what I'd give for the TGD team to gimme a beta to play with Basically, the movie I'm making at the moment calls for a lot of flyovers and fast moving terrain. I'm doing some of this with just aerial photography, and some parts can be done in Terragen 1. But the scale of some parts (and the nature of the terrain) sort of dictates a larger scale to things. Hard to explain. And it's 2:30 AM...

Hey - for anyone ever wanting to know just how much stars move when you travel at certain speeds... play with Celestia. it's mentioned earlier in this thread.
Basically, I think you have to go at a speed something like 1 light year a second before the stars move even a tiny bit. So yeah - the effect is bunk.

 

I'm just hoping they come through on their release date - it seems to be pushed back more and more unless I'm just looking in the wrong places.

Ever since I saw The Hunt I've been interested in 3D terrain. I've used Terragen for a long time and have had some success with animation, but for large scenes with trees or any kind of vegetation I've had to look towards Vue d'Esprit. The best I've been able to come up with so far is something similar to this picture but even that has a lot of flaws. At least I kept it under 600,000,000 polygons!

 

That's some sweet stuff right there!
I suck at Vue. I just couldn't figure the bloody thing out. On the other hand, Terragen is so nice to me.
As for TGD - yep. Delay, delay, delay. I remember the bad ol' days when the release date was Q1 2005. Heh.