Picogen

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]

• 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

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.