Picogen - Misplaced Pages

Artificial terrain rendering software

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picogen


Developer(s)	Sebastian Mach

Stable release	0.3 / July 20, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-07-20)

Repository	git.sv.gnu.org/picogen.git
Written in	C++
Operating system	Linux, Windows
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Scenery generator
License	GPL, Version 3, or newer
Website	picogen.org

A canyon landscape with snow-like shader

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

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, in which heightmaps are programmed in a syntax reminiscent of Lisp.

The shading system is partially programmable.

Example features

Whitted-Style ray tracer for quick previews
Rudimentary path tracer for high quality results
Partial implementation of Preetham's Sun-/Skylight Model
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.

References

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

External links

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Core technologies	ACIS C3D HOOPS 3D KernelCAD Open Cascade Technology Parasolid Romulus RGK ShapeManager Teigha IntelliCAD
Comparison Category List 3D modeling 3D rendering

Fractal software

Open-source

GNU

Freeware

Retail

Cross-platform	Bryce Chaotica Maple Ultra Fractal Wolfram Mathematica
Windows only	VisSim

Scenery generator

Found objects

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