Hi,
My real name is Andy Wachelder but because I learned that this is hard to pronounce for the non-dutch my handle is AndyWelder
Born 1954 in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, a couple of hundred metres from the Northsea.
Nowadays I live in Eindhoven, with my girl friend, my two sons, eight cats and a dog.
I'm a scifi addict; favourite writers are Larry Niven, Jack Vance, Frank Herbert and Carl Lans. (you've probably never heard of that last one: he's Dutch and a lot of his stories are situated in my place of birth.) Besides that I like art: paintings, sculptures, architecture, books, textiles, furniture etc. Other fields of interest are geology, biology (Yes I do watch Discovery/National Geography Channel a lot :-)), bonsai and of course computers.
I'm working as an Assistent System Administrator (what a job title..) now but before that I was interior builder, exhibition builder and it al started with being a cabinet maker.
In the early 70's I started painting, oil on board, most of the time scifi landscapes with a touch of surrealism. When I started working as an exhibition builder in 1990 this stopped because of the lack of time.
Because of a damaged backspine and joint problems I had to quit the exhibition building and started as an interior builder in 1995. Around the same time the first PC made his entry, a 386 with a whopping 48 MB harddrive. One thing led to another and in 1999 this proud owner of a P350 discovered Terragen and got hooked.
The inspiration for my Terragen landscapes I get from everywhere: the many travelling I did while working as an international exhibition builder, the daily walks with our dog, seashells, bits of rock or bark, stories I read and documentaries I watch.
Most of my TG renders are realistic, except for a few excursions in the realm of scifi and fantasy, and I don't mind the fact that it's not possible to render plants or creatures with the current version of TG.
Postwork is not my thing, my postwork sucks, so I let Terragen do the talking; nevertheless I admire what some people can do with TG and postwork.
Because of the somewhat limited terrain building possibilities of TG I use more versatile programs like WorldMachine, TerraFormer and GeoControl to create my terrains. But when it comes to dressing up terrains I find Terragen is unbeatable.
As I mentioned, I'm born near the sea and I'm Dutch, that's why water is a part of most of my images and so is the colour green. Those grand dutch skies however, well, Terragen is not capable of rendering multiple cloud layers and that's why I just muddle along with what TG offers. But the new Terragen, TG2TP, is much promising except for the extreme long render times and the awfully dull water. Planetside is working on that so I'll be patient.