Picogen

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

picogen
Developer(s)Sebastian Mach
Stable release
0.3 / July 20, 2010 (2010-07-20)
Repository
Written inC++
Operating systemLinux, Windows
PlatformCross-platform
TypeScenery generator
LicenseGPL, Version 3, or newer
Websitepicogen.org
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. Introduction to mkheightmap
  2. Height Language Reference
  3. Shaders in picogen
  4. A Practical Analytical Model for Daylight, Preetham, et al.


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