Landing Pictures

I found them. Or, what is probably most of them. So, these pictures are the “full rez” 1024×768 versions of the Aftermath landing pictures. One for each world the player could land on. I believe the actual in-game size was somewhat lower and more rectangular, but I’m happy these are the ones I have and not the smaller versions.

Each of these pictures was made in a program called Terragen. The first version. Not the current day version 4 that is used in just about every big name movie you’ve ever heard of. My process started by using the in app tools to randomly generate a height map. Sometimes I was looking for something  specific, like a valley with mountains in the background, but most times I’d generate a map, then place the camera in a few different locations until I found one I liked.

From there, Terragen’s tools were fairly simple but fun to play with. It was all about laying different materials one over the other to get a desired look. You’d place limits on each layer to define where it appeared in a scene. Like, if you wanted grass that existed in a valley but not all the way up a mountain you could set a maximum height for your grass layer. You could also set limits based on maximum slope. So, maybe a darker brown dirt would give way to the lighter colored rock beneath it when a hillside or mountain got too vertical. Layers could have sublayers too, so you could have blue specks of flowers only able to appear in grassy areas without having to redefine exactly where the flowers could show up. So, yeah, simple tools but with some mixing and matching you could combine then to make some pretty stuff.

Oh… hover over the pics for the planet names. Most of them have one. 🙂