Nothing compares to the soul inspiring grandeur and quiet beauty of artificial generated landscapes.

Earlier this week, my friend and fellow designer, Enrique, stumbled across this interesting little piece of freeware called Terragen. The purpose of this diabolically titled program is to allow one to generate… let’s call them terrains… with one’s computer. Hmmm….

The program’s results harken back to the early days of Bryce* but, without the demand on the user to understand 3D wire-framing. The two of us have now spent the better part of a week trying to wrap our collective mind around the in’s and out’s of Terragen and explore its potential. So far we’re pretty self-impressed with the results. It helps to have Photoshop to make more realistic landscapes but, the program is still pretty easy to use as-is. Version 2 is currently in the works and it remains to be seen as to whether Terragen will remain freeware for much longer. It runs on both PCs and MACs so give it a shot or, at the very least, check out their gallery of more accomplished landscape artists.

(*For the non-design geeks in the audience, Bryce was 3D landscaping program that was popular in the early days — i.e., pre-Pixar.)