I have been playing around with Terragen. I find it a lot of fun and I decided to try and combine both Terragen and Carrara on a sean. I have not completed this but so far I am pleased. I need to work on the background Terragen image a bit more and ad a couple of elements for the foreground part in Carrara. I want to add a little table and with some drinks and a plant in a pot.

That's a nice image. Terragen is a good way to get landscape backgrounds into C. C's capabilities in that area are a bit basic - although DGC's Ground Control will actually import Terragen terrain files if you were keen to explore all the possibilities. You can even use T to generate an HDRI map for environmental lighting and reflections. There's a tut thread in this forum some months back that I started. You might consider making a few rocks in C and adding them to your scene. At the moment IMHO, the mid-ground is a little lacking. Otherwise great!

Oh, I like it. Very restful. Just what I needed on this less-than-restful morning. Who is Sean?

So Terragen can do HDRI? I did not know this. I will have to look up your tutorial. Hopefully I can still follow it from a Mac. Yes I agree that Carrara and even Bryce lack the reality that Terragen can produce. I will take your advice and try to build a shadow catcher element so that I can integrate some mid-ground stuff in to the composition.

Pinklet, I think it looks great! If you can create some more wood textures for your planks' shaders that might enhance the look a bit as the wood planks all seem to have the same or similar textures to them - also the water doesn't look quite right to me but I'm sure that's just me. Keep with it! lookin' good so far, - TJ

Sadly the tutorial for getting HDRIs from Terragen into Carrara involves using HDRShop which is only avaliable for Windows. There may be another wat though; I'll investigate it when I've a moment.

falconpergot: Thanks, I am thinking of buying the full license to Terragen. It just give outstanding results with very little effort. Now if you put effort in to it it just gets better. I love Carrara, but I don't think it's possible to get the skies you get with Terragen. The water and mountains yes, but not the skies. Now getting that HDRI would be a god send.

bikermouse: I did make several textures of wood and applied them randomly, but I agree working a bit more to make them unique to each other will go a long way towards credibility. I already did some more work on it and it is looking better I will post the final in my gallery.
Thanks for you input.

Pinklet, unfortunately the plugin (SOPack) that you need for outputting HDR files from Terragen is also only for Windows, so that firmly puts the spanner in the works for you. :-( There is a HDR viewer for Mac, Photosphere, which is avaliable here: http://www.anyhere.com/ in case that is of use.

I do appreciate your help. My brother is buying a Mac and he probably will give me his PC. If this software is not to resource intensive I might be able to create the HDR and then move it to the Mac. I don't like PC to much but I will not go their and start a thread about Mac vs. PC's. :-) Thanks for looking into this. Cristian.

Cristian, I'm glad to help when I can. You might try using the Environmental Lighting feature of Carrara. Insert a sphere and scale it so that it encloses your scene (say about 600inches size). Then map your Terragen scene to the color or glow channel. Back in the Assembly Room select Edit>Environment al Lighting. It's not a bad alternative to HDR. Of course you'll need a panorama from Terragen. It's not too difficult to write a script to do this, although if you want a perfect job you'll need to use some sort of panorama editing program to distort the polar areas. Regards, Mark

Also you could open the terrain you created in Photoshop and sharp it, adjust color, etc to make it look more realistic.