Recently I was lucky enough to discover the application Terragen while navigating through Wikipedia. Its render quality is absolutely fantastic for an application that is both free and several years old, and while mucking through it I thought that it might be fun  to import a few heightmaps from games and render them into near-photo quality images. This was easier said than done, however, and after exporting heightmaps from Fallout 3 in a myriad of formats (RAW 8/16 bit, Targa, Gif, Png) I finally got an accessory application for Terragen to properly import the bitmap version of Fallout 3’s heightmap. Originally, the map was much too flat in Terragen, but after scaling it up and changing the colors to be a little bit muddier, the following result was yielded:

From Terragen

The roughly corresponding view in Fallout 3

As you can see, the results are very different in many respects, namely the lack of game objects from the Terragen render, but rendering landscapes from video game heightmaps is still an interesting exercise for a boring weekend!

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE!

Another application I’ve found through Wikipedia is Sterling2 – a small but very powerful application that renders fractals beautifully. Not just the classic Mandelbrot Set, mind you, but a nearly endless amount of filters and permutations that can make an amazing bunch of fractals. I’ve included one of my own below, but the site for Sterling2 and the Wikipedia page on Sterling  have more examples.