Picogen
Artificial terrain rendering software
Picogen is a rendering system for the creation and rendering of artificial terrain, based on ray tracing. It is free software.
01Overview
While the primary purpose of picogen is to display realistic 3D terrain, both in terms of terrain formation and image plausibility, it also is a heightmap-creation tool, in which heightmaps are programmed in a syntax reminiscent of Lisp.
The shading system is partially programmable.
02Example features
- Whitted-Style ray tracer for quick previews
- Rudimentary path tracer for high quality results
- Partial implementation of Preetham's Sun-/Skylight Model
- Procedural heightmaps, though before rendering they are tesselated
03Frontends
Currently there is a frontend to picogen, called picogen-wx (based on wxWidgets). It is encapsulated from picogen and thus communicates with it on command-line level. Picogen-wx provides several panels to design the different aspects of a landscape, e.g. the Sun/Sky- or the Terrain-Texture-Panel. Each panel has its own preview window, though each preview window can be reached from any other panel.
Landscapes can be loaded and saved through an own, simple XML-based file format, and images of arbitrary size (including antialiasing) can be saved.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Picogen”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Picogen-alpine.png by Unknown author, Cc-by-sa-3.0
- Picogen logo.jpg by Phresnel, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Picogen-cascades.png by Phresnel, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Picogen-sample-heightmap.png by Phresnel, CC BY-SA 3.0
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