Procedural Terrain Generation

This is an area of interest for me personally. I’ve found websites like vterrain.org and pcg.wikidot.com , but neither are that great, and haven’t been updated for a while. I figured I’d take a shot at learning, then. Does anyone know any good resources, or have any suggestions?
I’m also well aware that I won’t be making spectacular landscapes on my first try, I’m not that naïve.

Try Terragen. It’s really powerful and I believe that there’s even a free version of it. Although I’m not sure if you can export anything 3d out of it, because it uses some sort of fractals.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”

When you say, procedural, how much input are you looking to provide? In other words, how much control do you want. Blender has two methods, the addon ANT landscape and Bsurfaces. The first does it all for you, and the second needs the design from you before generating the mesh.
Another method is to use a height map as the image for the displace modifier. This is easily the most accurate, but your height map has to come from outside Blender.

Yeah, I’d like more control, but I’m a terrible modeler. I’ll give Terragen and Vue a try, but I can’t afford a license… I’ve tried various heightmap projects on sourceforge, all of which seem to have potential, but aren’t quite there yet. I haven’t tried Burfaces though, I’ll give that a try. Thanks for your responses!

World Machine has a free version, although they limit the ouput resolution. It’s a node-based system.

http://www.world-machine.com/

Steve S

If price is a problem, try Bryce (just $20):

Very simple to use, with a lot of control.

Funny no-one mentioned this here - Bryce used to be the "standard’ in landschap generation software. It has not been updated for a while, but is still quite powerful (btw, it does not run on the latest versions of macosx).