Picogen

Picogen

Picogen

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Picogen is a rendering system for the creation and rendering of artificial terrain, based on ray tracing. It is free software.

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A canyon landscape with snow-like shader.
An alpine landscape.

Overview

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,[1] in which heightmaps are programmed in a syntax reminiscent of Lisp.[2]

The shading system is partially programmable.[3]

Example features

  • Whitted-Style ray tracer for quick previews
  • Rudimentary path tracer for high quality results
  • Partial implementation of Preetham's Sun-/Skylight Model [4]
  • Procedural heightmaps, though before rendering they are tesselated

Frontends

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.

The heightmap panel.

References

  1. [1]
    Introduction to mkheightmap
  2. [2]
    Height Language Reference
  3. [3]
    Shaders in picogen
  4. [4]
    Preetham, et al. (1999). "A Practical Analytical Model for Daylight". Archived from the original on 18 April 2009.


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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Picogen, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.