Update

Did a little color tweaking over the weekend as well as a little "coast-line" work to smooth things out a bit and give the land more of a "excavated" appearance. The first image below shows the result of that work. One of the early problems was separating land from atmosphere as far as coloring goes, and I managed to accomplish this by shifting to a strata effect for land coloring while adjusting the sun's color to match something typical for a spectral class K star.

From there, I moved on to the process of adding structures. This is, at least in Terragen, a painstaking process that eats up a lot of time as each building has to be added in on an individual basis and built as a separate elevation file, keeping in mind the height constraints set by the primary elevation file. In addition to this, there is a fair amount of editing to do with the base elevation file to smooth out the foundations for each building. My thought is to lay out the buildings first (along with a coloring mask) and, once I'm satisfied with them, start laying out the vegetation masks for the cultivated areas. As a means of giving the impression that the area around the Lift Station is evolving, I'm also going to include a random distribution of vegetation using TG's internal Fractal Noise, Coverage, Altitude and Slope features.

From there, it will be on to the roads and/or Transportation Tubes/Bridges. I don't see much of a problem with these with the exception of the Transportation Tubes/Bridges where they might cross over water, or where they might be above ground level. TG (at least version 0.9.43) doesn't have the ability to render such things in a single shot, so it might call for a double render and some post render editing in PSP or Gimp.

One of the things I have been debating as a little "spice" to the end result is the possibility of adding a little stellar debris to the sky in the sense that with a thinner atmosphere, it might be possible to see some stars in the sky even during the day. I'm not 100 percent set on this idea yet and will have to wait and see how the rest of the rendering process turns out before I finalize that idea. If I do go for it though, I'll likely follow the suggestions in one of Joe's tutorials about using FTPro to generate star fields.

As an added bonus, the second image below gives a very basic idea of what the structures are going to look like once I've nailed them down as far as elevation goes. The current sample displays somewhat exaggerated building heights, but they will be tweaked into proportion once I've gotten more proficient with the process of adding them in. At some point, as well, I'll try to decide on an architectual style for the buildings to give them more of a cultural feel.

GW