Terragen

Susan,

Once you start playing with it … you just can’t stop!!

Wendy

I do love this new Mac! Must get the cables and wires under control. The cat is not allowed into this room, he would just love it!
Also I must configure the net stuff, to get properly connected with the proper browser. I am so used to Netscape and its Mail program, that I will have to ask some questions about the browser that I should use and how to set up my mail. How to configure this, too. I assume I just put in the outgoing and incoming stuff like I have on the other Macs,,,,,,?
I don’t want to lose as that is my original address, and I have all the .adelphia.net and the .mac.com and all the other mail funneled into it.
I will use my same Netscape mail here on the G4 until I feel as if I can deal with the new stuff. Might take a few days. I want to use iPhoto right away, but must do a bit of reading on it too. Glad we have a bad storm coming or otherwise the yard would be competing with the new Mac. Jane

Way to go, Jane, it looks marvelous.

dick

Just spent a few minutes going thru the Terragen albums, Oh My Goodness, what awesome pictures! So I just downloaded the program.
Between PSE, the new Mac, GoLive, Bryce, and the mere thought of learning Terragen, my summer garden and flowers might just suffer.
Thank god I am retired!
Jane

Jane,
Congrats on your new mac machine!
Well, you can’t garden in the dark or rainy days . . .so loads of time to play with all your new stuff. 😉

beth

Congratulations on the new iMac Jane! It’s a very cute machine!

Ray

It is raining today! Thank goodness.
I now have to learn OS X and set up the internet connection and all the other goodies. I am going to move all of Sara’s lessons and the best picture folders over to the external hard drive and then to the new Mac.
I could do the Firewire Target mode too, but I need to sort out the stuff first. Oh, this is really fun!
That Terragen is really fantastic! Thanks for the link, I will play with the program more this afternoon.
I better read the help PDF first, but its so much fun to play. Jane

Congrats on your new Mac, Jane. Thanks for the photo cause otherwise, being April 1st…couldn’t be sure. Of course you could have easily faked the photo but…naw…I’ll bet it’s the real thing.

On the left side of the page there is a mini pdf for iPhoto… also a mini pdf Mac Os X hints…free! Maybe you already got the Mac OS X missing manual already. Highly recommend getting it.

<http://www.missingmanual.com/>

Hi Jane,

Sure that you will love the iMac … now you need to give her a name. (Ours is called Shu-Shu… it just seems to suit her 🙂 🙂 )

Wendy

I call mine Mac. Not very imaginative, huh? 🙂

Thanks for the tip on Terragen Wendy. I downloaded it.

Hi Mark, I have the old Missing Manual, the one pub in Nov 2002. Thanks for that great link! There will be a lot of help there for me. That will be one of my first bookmarks, favourites, or what ever the new browser calls them.
I am just in the process of setting up the internet and cable stuff. Hi Wendy, I didnt think of naming it, her. The G4 is Janie’s Mac, the Powerbook is my Mini-Mac, my husband’s is Richies Mac, and we will have to think of a good name for this one. Maybe I will let my husband have the honor of picking her name.
I shall install PSE, GoLive, and a few more this afternoon. Jane

I’m still playing with Terragen – it is very cool. Apart from generating fantasy landscapes I think that its main serious use that I would find for it is generating skies to replace boring ones in photographs – those render rather more quickly at larger size then a whole landscape. I’ve also been experimenting with creating greyscale bitmaps in Elements to import as terrain maps – they are easier to edit and tweak than using Terragen’s own terrain editor.

Susan S.

Susan,

Some of the skys are brilliant but I have found that unless you use very large files both land and sea come out nowhere near as good. Have you tried the 3D rendering of clouds yet?

Wendy

I just found this Jane. Congratulations! But I thought you were going to get a G5?

That is what my husband wanted me to get, but it would really have been overkill. This one has 1G memory and the 20" screen, and I really couldn’t let him spend the extra money(and space) on something that I perhaps would not need at all.

Just tried Terragen on the G4 and it runs like a charm,(oh my goodness what a program!), so the new iMac would do better.
Very soon my grandsons will be looking for computers for themselves, so if after a couple of years if this one is not up to what I want/need, then I will pass this one on to them and get a G5 for grandma.

This G4 which I have stuffed full of memory will run all my programs simultaneously and never really slows down(yes for some of the fancy filters), so I assume that the new one would be sufficient for me.
But the grandsons are waiting,,,,,,,, they are only very young. Jane

On the left side of the page there is a mini pdf for iPhoto… also a mini pdf Mac Os X hints…free! Maybe you already got the Mac OS X missing manual already. Highly recommend getting it.

I second that Mark! I’ve had it since day one and it answered 95% of my questions! And there’s a lot of humour in it as well, helps when the topics get too technical.

Ray

now you need to give her a name. (Ours is
called Shu-Shu… it just seems to suit her 🙂 🙂 )

Wendy

You know, I was trying to give my G5 a name.. But just can’t find anything suitable. If you have suggestions, I’m listening. The first I had in mind was Mr Spock (because of the rigid aluminum casing), but since my Mac is so much fun, I don’t think it would suit it well.. 😉

Ray

Ray,

I’ve learned most of everything I know about Macs from David Pogue’s books (Dummies) since my first Mac in 1995. I’ve always enjoyed his humorous writing style.

Wendy – not yet – I’ve just tried a few of the default settings and presets to get an idea of how it works. Its a long time since I last played with any 3-D applications and I had forgotten how long rendering can actually take! I might set it to work on something while I am out this afternoon. I was half way through a long render (more than a couple of hours in total I would guess) when the power went out yesterday afternoon.. and i haven’t tried since. Of course I hadn’t saved the settings…

Susan S

Mark,

My Mac guru friend said the same thing about David Progue. Since then, I ran a search on Amazon.ca and found quite a number of books he either wrote or co-authored. A very prolific author!

Ray

He’s the classic overachiever if ever I saw one. I’ve often wondered when the guy sleeps. And he actually does respond to email messages as he promises in his books.

The guy is multi threaded… !

Ray

All this talk about Terragen prompted me to download and install it yesterday. Seems to me I remember someone posting a link to a site that had some information on using the thing. Or, did I simply dream it?

Dick

Whoops, if one would "read" the home page one wouldn’t post silly requests!

I found what I was looking for at the Terragen web page.

Dick

The pictures that are on the Terragen site are just beautiful! I think I will install it on the new Mac once I have learned a bit about it on the G4. So many neat things to try!

Also I have many David Pogue books, his books just have that something special about them, that helps me more than a lot of the others.

Looking at those mini PDFs, the one that I downloaded is a .dmg and I couldnt get it to open? How would I get it to be a .pdf file?

I better start reading the book before I go too far,
Jane

Jane,

That is just strange. I haven’t a clue how a pdf would become a dmg. Try downloading it again and see if it does the same thing.

Ray,

I’m all out of ideas for new Mac names … our poor little iBook is as yet nameless.

The iMac reminds me of ballet dancer in a Tutu …. so Shu-Shu sort of grew out of that.

Wendy

Susan,

Are you rendering to screen or file … file seems to be quite a bit faster. What a pain losing your creation … I now save before rendering as it happened a couple of times to me.

Wendy

My husband says it looks like one half a soccer ball. I had no idea that the iMacs were so heavy for their size!
What is inside the base besides computer innards, a hunk of Plutonium? How about Plutie? Nahhhhh We will have to think of something cuter than that. For something so beautiful, its got to have a nice name.

I will try to download the pdf files again. This one took a long time to download, not like they usually do.
I thought it was strange, then it wouldn’t open correctly and when I finally got it to open, it was a .dmg.
I wonder what a .dmg file is?

No time to use Terragen today, with a funeral to attend, and a grandson to spend the morning with, Jane

… iMacs were so heavy for their size!

Needed to support the monitor from such a small pedestal, eh?

Mac

I think the monitor is spring loaded, so the whole thing is almost as heavy as our dog! Now we have to name it.
Jane

edit, was just looking thru the Yahoo Terragen groups picture albums, OH MY GOODNESS what awesome stuff. I just have to get using this program!
Jane

Jane,

I think the .dmg file is the primary format for most of the Apple (OS X) applications. You have the software on your computer that should automatically expand the .dmg file for you when you double click it. Then you transfer the contents to your ‘applications folder’ and delete (eject) the original folder. If you look at it in finder you will see a little triangle to the right of the icon. Click the triangle and it deletes the folder.

"Half a soccer ball’ is a pretty common description of the iMac base.

dmg stands for Disk iMaGe and it’s mounted, like a CD-ROM, onto the desktop.

Ray

That explains this, I thought these would be pdf files. So I just went to get them on my G4. No wonder they were so large files, I had to trash them. What happened to the good old PDF format? I like that very much, all our lessons are pdfs and they are so easy. Can I transform these dmgs into PDFs, and read them here on the G4? I like PDFs, they are so compatible! And they dont take up so much space.
Jane

Now Jane..one thing about Panther. I think it will convert Adobe PDF to Preview automatically. It’s Mac’s pdf reader. Give it a try. It’s, shhh, a bit faster and simpler than Adobe’s Reader but, if you want, you can change all the files back to Adobe Reader by ‘get info’… and change the file association for all.

Jane, YOu can email me with questions and I’m sure Joe Henry or other Mac folks will be happy to assist you.

Hi Mark, Thanks all,,,,,I sure will need some help, it is just that at the moment, being a bit overwhelmed,,,,,
I am having trouble remembering all this new stuff all at once. Mail(how to configure it), iTunes(where are the Blues stations), browser(which one to use), iPhoto(which photos to put in it), PSE and my other programs(which ones to install first), and all these transitional things.
Plant my spring bulbs,,,,,,housework, forget that stuff, Jane

well i figured out how to make some awesome mountains and skies but yet to figure out how to add water to it…I don’t ‘do’ manuals….I like figuring out stuff on my own 🙂

Jodi,

When you generate the Landscape you need to move the camera so that the water shows in the image …. the water shows up on the Landscape window as the blue bits.

Wendy

well thanks Wendy…you made it easy for me 🙂 …so I guess I cheated a little with that post 😉

Keep this instruction going as I should have some time to use Terragen tomorrow, and oh is it superb!
You artists will give it a good shake down cruise for us beginners, so please do post some of your work and hints.
Jane

One thing I would note – the Mac version of Terragen is an iteration behind the windows version and the plug ins are not yet all available (although according to the mac terragen yahoo groups site they should be there Real Soon – there are links there for the beta mac versions of the water plugins that allow surf, waves, lava and ice flows) Some of the really spectacular images in the galleries rely heavily on the plugins (in particular the ability to mask and do texture overlays and rock strata) as well as importing real surface terrains. It is still possible to do some very attractive stuff. I’m still struggling with controlling the effects – particulalry the surface colourations – it’s luck rather than judgment whether the effects work.

And to drag the thread to being on-topic for this forum, there are some interesting possibilities for post processing in Elements that I’ve read about eg- creating panoramas by rendering several shots of the same landscape and then photmerging the together; creating waterfalls by rendering the same landscape with the water level at two different points and then joining the two lakes at different levels with a fall of water..

Jodi, re: how to get water in TG. Try this: Open the water menu. See where it says water level…I think very top box. It’s marked by default -300m. Just change it to whatever it takes to raise your water level to your satisfaction. You can flood the whole mountain range if you want.

Terri

Susan,

Where did you find the address for the Mac Terragen user group site?

And … Is it just me or do you find that once you have rendered the file it looks far better once you have used LEVELS on it?

Wendy

Wendy – I think I found a link to it on the main yahoo Terragen forum which is linked on the Terragen website –

it’s <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TerragenMac/>

Most of the discussion there is pretty technical, but Jo Meder, the guy who ported Terragen to the mac posts links to all the betas of plugins that he is working on there, so it’ s worth checking over.
And yes levels and a dose of USM definitely improve the look imho.

Susan S

Terri. Thanks ! I did end up just clicking everything and anything to see what it did…and did come up with some water…but couldn’t figure out how to do it with the water menu…you clarified it for me…thanks.

Wendy, I agree, the images tend to look a little disaturated and almost a little clouded…sometimes it looks really cool that way but yes, i did play with the levels and contrast in Elements to perk it up a bit…but I lowered the opacity of the adjustment layers…I still kind of liked the faded image but not so much…ya know ?

Thanks Susan … I must have missed it.

Wendy

Thank you for the link and the continuing information about Terragen. It is way beyond me, but I have downloaded it and am going to try following some of your instructions. Mine come out pretty bad, but it is fun to try.
I haven’t even used my Bryce 5 yet,,,,,,,
What fantastic pictures on some of the albums!
Jane

Terri,

Thanks for the water tip. Terragen is cool but definitely has a learning curve!

Dick

Dick and Jodi, I agree with Jodi. It’s best to just get in there and adjust stuff. You might want to do a Google search. There are some pretty neat plug’s for the water…white caps, surf, water gradients, etc. Just note you have to have the TGPGuiLib.DLL plug-in to make the three or four available plug-ins work. Make sure you strip them out of the folders and just throw them in the terragen program file. I found no plug-ins, ter. file or surface file will work unless it’s naked (without the folder). This is really a neat way to do backgrounds to use with the challenge entries. In fact, used it in my #1 and #4. I think I might just head over and take a look at that link provided a few post ago.

Terri

The waterworks plugins are available for the mac, but they are only betas – there’s a link for the downloads in a Yahoo Mac terragon group post- and installation is different for macs – you need to create a terragen application support folder in the right place in the user library. Then they work!

Dialling the level of mist right down in the atmosphere dialogue gives much clearer shots. (or up can make it interesting – and putting the half height of mist down creates the mist over the lake effect)…I’m still struggling with creating my own surfaces. They come out like bad painting by numbers at the moment!

Susan, maybe try adjusting your camera zoom. Also if your rendering stuff that you can see under…ribbon effect then your camera is set too low and your looking under the landscape. Yes, Susan I gave directions for PC. Always forgetting that although pretty close… the PC and Mac are different beasts.

Terri

WARNING: This software is addicting !!! If you have things to do not, I repeat DO NOT open this program. You’ll be playing around for hours and never get anything else accomplished.

Hi Jodi, That is what PSE did to me! House work is not very big around here any more. Terragen is awesome! It is difficult for me now, but I will work on it,,,,,,, Jane

I can’t stop playing with it …. I wonder if its posible to "render" the housework!! 🙂

Wendy