Mustafar Landscape

A lot of the stuff I'm posting here is way out of chronological order. I made this scene shortly after I figured out how to get Cycles to work, and after some experiments with displacement mapping to make terrain. As I was playing around with this technique, a thought entered my head: "Who needs Terragen?"

I hadn't thought about Terragen for probably 17 years. I'm pretty sure it was my first EVER foray into the realm of 3D rendering, and nothing I made with it was what I would've called "good" even back then, but it was fun to play with and I got some renders I would've called "neat." I went looking to see if I still had any of those old renders in my backups, and YEP. Still got 'em! And yes, of course, I took it as another chance to kick 14-year-old me's ass at something.

One of the better renders I made with Terragen was an attempt to create the landscape of Mustafar, the fiery volcanic planet from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which had just recently come out. (2005, remember?) It turned out Terragen (or at least the version I had access to at the time) wasn't equipped to make lava, so I had to try and cheat to make the *water* look like it. Ended up with something looking more like orange soda, but I was either satisfied or tired of messing with settings and ready to be done with it.

The Blender version posted here is actually a slightly adjusted re-render (like I did for the Bloodborne piece), because I wasn't happy with the sky texture, and the volumes I used for the smoke didn't look quite right, so I fixed those. The original render is still on my Tumblr if you want to go searching for it and compare.