3/17/25: Swiss Mountains

I have recently been messing around with Gaea 2.0 for terrain generation and decided to make a Swiss mountain scene. This was my first actual project, so I followed their official documentation as a tutorial to get used to the program. Overall, it is an intuitive program, but it would be much easier if I knew all the node functions.


To start off, I started with a mountain range node. I wanted to have a valley that looked up into the mountains, as I initially thought of making the final product a wallpaper. After adding an outcrop to increase the height and roughness, I added some stratification to give it a more “alpine” look. Finally, using a combine node and a gabor node with a height mask to only grab the lower “valley” part of the scene, the terrain was much more flowy and what I had initially envisioned.



Next, I tried to understand people's coloring techniques, although I was planning to export and add materials in Blender. First, I added a snow and river node to add more realism. The river node was connected to a texture base to help give it some texturing, which was then partitioned into two SatMaps for the blue (water) and green (grass). A combine node with the river's depth was used to add the colors and prevent overlapping. For the snow node, I used its depth to connect to a filter and multiplied it. Then, I used a CLUTer node to give it a gradient from the height. After that, it reconnected with a combine node and using another height node, combined them!

Overall, I am quite happy with my first project, but I definitely need to spend some more time learning the ins and outs of Gaea. Hopefully over the summer I can learn how to use blender to make some nice atmospheric elements!