Get Sloping Beaches using Internal Terrains

The biggest problem people have is getting that gentle slope into the sea or river and usually end up with plunging rocks which are a nightmare to try and texture properly and rarely look convincing. In later tutorials, I will cover the texturing of shorelines and utilising external terrains, but for now, this tutorial is going to show you how to do this using the internal terrain generation routines without going into any texturing details.

I am assuming the following before anyone attempts to do this, you have both Terragen and the Waterworks plugin downloaded and can render an image. That is really the only requirements here. I have supplied the corresponding world file and terrain files for you to explore and analyse, you can use them as you please, but one restriction on these downloads is that you do not render the currently configured scene and call it your own work, but you may use the resources in any other way you please.

OK, without further ado, start up Terragen and open the landscape dialog.

The first thing to do is change your map size from the default 257x257 to a larger one to reduce those jaggies, if your unregistered, choose 513, otherwise choose something even larger than that.

To change the size, click on the numbered button underneath the terrain viewer (black square when you start) - The default is 7680 metres. You will be shown the "Landscape Settings" dialog box. Select your new mapsize and click yes to confirm the change.

You will be asked if you want to resize the terrain, click yes.

Before leaving the Landscape Setting screen, make the following adjustments to enhance your render.

Change the "metres point spacing" to 60 - this will effectively put more atmosphere between your camera and the target - the render will appear a little more hazy in the distance and give a better feeling of depth in your scenes. The other value to change is the Planet radius, change this to 50,000 to straighten the landscape up and give the sky a better stretched out look.

Click OK when your done. That has now laid the foundation for our terrain.

Now click on the "Generate Terrain" button in the Landscape dialog window.

The Terrain Genesis dialog allows you to specify the type of terrain you want, for this tutorial, we will use the defaults - so simply click the Generate button, then select the close button.

5. Click on the "Modify Terrain" button to bring up the Terrain modification dialog (for some reason, this one is titled "s" ??)

Type 50 in the field to the right of Scale Vertical and click the "Scale Vertical" button. This will re-scale your terrain and lower the massive peaks you would have had on your terrain.

Now click the "Glaciate" button - This is the important step here, don't miss it out, it will create a seabed and give you some subtle slopes you can use for your beach.

Thats it as far as generating your terrain, now you need to fill it with water. Using your mouse, hover over the new terrain - in the centre part of a dark patch and watch the value at the bottom of this dialog for the "Z" value change. This screenshot shows it as -233.5m - that is the height in metres of your seabed.

Open your water dialog and change the water level so it is at that z value. You will now see the water filling the black areas, increase or decrease the water level until you have a solid body of water AND a surrounding dark area of low ground.

Position your camera at the edge of this water and try to point inwards to the centre of your terrain so you avoid the end-of-the-world syndrome (the edge of the map). Render preview until you get the view you want.

So, we now have out terrain and our water, make sure you don't forget to reduce that shadow lightness and if you don't want drama, get the sun so it points across your scene to pick out some interesting shadows. All these settings will be explored in another tutorial, but feel free to have a play..

11. Add your textures to the scene as required, as I mentioned earlier, I will be writing a tutorial to show you how to efficiently texture a shoreline, I have created just 4 textures in the world file that comes with this tutorial just to help with the explanation - you will probably need to expand substantially on those to get a realistic enough scene. But as always, feel free to play and try and understand how the altitude and slope settings work.

12. Now its time to render your image, you will notice I have modified the colours in this to enhance the look of this, I did that through Paintshop Pro. This image has been produced using the world file and terrain files supplied and must not be reproduced and called your own work.