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Description
This is a soon preview of the new frontend to picogen, called terrabite. Clearly, this is inspired by the commercial terragen 0.x, in an effort to make it easier to use for those who are used to terragen 0.x.

You can have multiple camera definitions in your scene file, and later on when several types of cameras are included (e.g. cubemap camera, hemisphere camera, and more maybe) this will make it very very convenient. Basically, you can take snapshots and plan your next render, without loosing the settings from a previous, cool rendition.

For the same reason, scenes can have multiple atmosphere or weather settings later. And if there are too many settings to remember which one contributed to your last awesome render, I even plan on coding together a "List of Settings-Combination", so that once you have 7 billion potential combinations, you won't forget which one of those combos you have used recently.

But back to the screenshot. You can see the camera-orientation window, which is imho self-explaining.

Further, there's the render preview window, which can be resized arbitrary (currently, preview updates happen in background (i.e. in another thread) upon window resize).

Lastly, the window on the right is what took me most of the work until now. It is the heightmap layers editor, clearly inspired by Gimp's Layer editor. You can have multiple layers of heightmaps, then combine them using operations like "add", "multiplay" or "lerp" (lerp is special in that it will allow to use yet another heightmap as the lerping operand; but more and clearer detail later).

You can lock each heightmap (to prevent accidental changes), make them visible/invisible, give them names, and finally, you can set a type for each heightmap.

I plan to implement 4 types:
* "1st class" (== a template or preset, with some tweakable parameters; very user friendly)
* "Composition", which would open up another heightmap-layers-window (so you can build an actual hierarchy)
* Bitmap, for when you have some cool heightmap laying around on your harddisk
* Code, which would open up a programmer editor and let's you type in program-code (which was the only option in the previous frontend, "picogen-wx"; for experienced users; gives you the maximum possible freedom)

All in all, another target audience of terrabite is game programmers, you will be able to get together cubemaps or skymaps in a glimpse; but it will also have advanced options to satisfy the "pure" user.

Finally, let me say you that "Picogen: Terrabite" is based on Trolltechs (@Nokia) "QT" widget toolkit, which makes it very portable (potentially to the cell phone).

Release plan: When it's usable and at least as mighty as previous picogen (essentially, the next picogen is a complete rewrite in terms of program code and frontend development).

Description
This is a soon preview of the new frontend to picogen, called terrabite. Clearly, this is inspired by the commercial terragen 0.x, in an effort to make it easier to use for those who are used to terragen 0.x.

You can have multiple camera definitions in your scene file, and later on when several types of cameras are included (e.g. cubemap camera, hemisphere camera, and more maybe) this will make it very very convenient. Basically, you can take snapshots and plan your next render, without loosing the settings from a previous, cool rendition.

For the same reason, scenes can have multiple atmosphere or weather settings later. And if there are too many settings to remember which one contributed to your last awesome render, I even plan on coding together a "List of Settings-Combination", so that once you have 7 billion potential combinations, you won't forget which one of those combos you have used recently.

But back to the screenshot. You can see the camera-orientation window, which is imho self-explaining.

Further, there's the render preview window, which can be resized arbitrary (currently, preview updates happen in background (i.e. in another thread) upon window resize).

Lastly, the window on the right is what took me most of the work until now. It is the heightmap layers editor, clearly inspired by Gimp's Layer editor. You can have multiple layers of heightmaps, then combine them using operations like "add", "multiplay" or "lerp" (lerp is special in that it will allow to use yet another heightmap as the lerping operand; but more and clearer detail later).

You can lock each heightmap (to prevent accidental changes), make them visible/invisible, give them names, and finally, you can set a type for each heightmap.

I plan to implement 4 types:
* "1st class" (== a template or preset, with some tweakable parameters; very user friendly)
* "Composition", which would open up another heightmap-layers-window (so you can build an actual hierarchy)
* Bitmap, for when you have some cool heightmap laying around on your harddisk
* Code, which would open up a programmer editor and let's you type in program-code (which was the only option in the previous frontend, "picogen-wx"; for experienced users; gives you the maximum possible freedom)

All in all, another target audience of terrabite is game programmers, you will be able to get together cubemaps or skymaps in a glimpse; but it will also have advanced options to satisfy the "pure" user.

Finally, let me say you that "Picogen: Terrabite" is based on Trolltechs (@Nokia) "QT" widget toolkit, which makes it very portable (potentially to the cell phone).

Release plan: When it's usable and at least as mighty as previous picogen (essentially, the next picogen is a complete rewrite in terms of program code and frontend development).