The taller you make it, the more natural the strata tend to look (but not up close stay far away with the camera). Make the strip wide enough so you can see what you are doing, but Terragen only uses the leftmost set of pixels. Wood grains are a good source for strata. You make a strata strip by making a very narrow and tall image in your paint program. These can be used to make rocks and the like. But if you are making plants for Hawaii or some other tropical place, the greens are often a little more vivid. You can make more realistic vegetation elsewhere by making a child under the plants that is slightly lighter in color. My greens are often around red=0, blue=0 to 2, and green= maybe 7 at the most, often less. Beach sand is pretty smooth, but seaweed will have higher fractal noise and less coverage. If you want seaweed on the beach, you add a second child and make it dark green. The boundary between these two does not want to be really sharp, but the more you reduce sharpness, the higher you will have to make the height of that layer. If you put your cursor over the terrain, it will tell you what the height (Z) of each place is. I will use a limit on the height to keep it from coming up the beach too far. To tell what I am doing when I first make it, I will often make it a very strange color so I can see exactly where it falls. The child will be somewhat darker, but the same basic hue. The layer underneath will be the lighter color, and it will have one child. Then for beaches, if I want water wetting the beach, I will make two layers. In general, I usually use soft pastels or darker colors, and keep the color saturation low. The sun will light them up, and if you make the color too bright, they won't look right. The best plants are usually a very dark green. Maybe the ground is fairly smooth, so I will make a smooth layer, but the plants will be rougher. The items lower on the list (from the top of the page) will cover the items further up in the list. I would usually put them as the last children. Then if I want plants, I will make some green layers, but they do not get nearly as much coverage. To get more blending, I lower fractal noise. Then I make several children which are similar in color to the basic ground color in each region, but not the same color as the basic color, or each other. If my inclines are slopes with plants, I will have a basic ground color which covers most, if not all, of the slope. Then I go to each region and create children under that. In the surface editor, I put several children under the base layer. And then there are more flat regions such as beaches. You have vertical regions (cliffs) on which I frequently use strata, using the plugin SOPack. I tend to divide my surface up into regions. As a surface element, it is much like sand. You can add a little color in a second layer, but snow is pretty much white. Snow appears on lesser slopes, as a general rule, and has a smooth texture. Flower are especially difficult in Terragen, but you can make convincing flower fields. You can't make discrete trees in Terragen 1x, but you can make distant forests. Evergreen trees are a very dark blue-green, while deciduous trees are lighter in color and more yellowish. The Dolomites in Italy are light in color. For example, much of the American southwestern deserts are basically reddish, while volcanic rock in Hawaii is black or near-black. You will learn some very basic things about the appearance of various scenes. Most important: LEARN TO SEE! You do this by looking at and studying many pictures of landscapes from different parts of the world. It is not complete, but it will cover most of the basics. This is just a collection of notes explaining what I do. Here I talk about making realistic surfaces for Terragen.
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