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; 15 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

• Free and open-source software portal

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