While I was blogging about
making your own ILM yesterday one of my students tipped me off to
Terragen (thanks Aaron). The more I saw of it the more it reminded me of
Bryce. Terragen, like Bryce, is a special-purpose 3d app for creating amazingly realistic landscapes. It's terribly easy to use, even for 3d newbies. If you've ever banged your head on Maya, give it a try. Very refreshing. Not only that, it is free for now. No guarantees about the future, but I haven't seen any real problems with it so far. Terragen is chock full of features, some of which I don't see in Bryce (like a scripting engine). And you can't argue with the
results... Oh, and it's available for OS X and Windows.
Tags: 3d, bryce, freeware, landscape, modeling, terrain
