Looks like a photo one might take off any coastline. But this scene doesn't exist, I would guess, anywhere on planet earth. It is entirely synthetic, generated by the use of randomly generated terrain maps and textures, and so on.

This was generated with the pre-sale version, basically a beta version, of the program - Terragen (FEB 2000, now version 0.8.11; but the settings here were saved using the much older 0.6.61). It's free for download (as of JUL 1999). There are, in addition, a couple of other programs which are useful for this early version of Terragen. One such program, called 3DEM, is provided for the purpose of reading and converting USGS satellite maps, but which can also be used to copy a small portion of such maps and convert it to a Terragen terrain file (if you wanted to play around with an accurate map of the hills you can see right out your kitchen window, or something). 3DEM is a good program, just by itself. A couple of others can be used to generate a script, which can then be used by Terragen to create a batch sequence of 'fly-by' images (which can take a prohibitively long time to draw, in Terragen, if you don't have a very fast processor), maybe 100 scenes/snapshots, 200, however many, which can then further be easily compiled into a movie, of whatever format (avi, mov, and so on). Both are free. One of these 'fly-by' script generators is called, Terranim, and hooks seamlessly into Terragen. The other is called, Campath, and provides a few extras not found in Terranim. As for quickly making the movie, the old demo applet from Microsoft, called VidEdit, allows you to drag and drop the first of the script generated images and it will automatically combine all following images to make a movie (if there are no gaps in file numbering); which you can then resize, etc. Finally, as for putting the movie on 'the web' some prefer Bink compression, which tends to preserve sharp details even at fairly high compression settings; in addition, Bink also can create a movie from raw frames, just like VidEdit, for those images numbered in sequence (I didn't know this, at first). So then, those are the basic tools.

This was the first scene I actually rendered at full or best quality. And I was very impressed with how convincing it looked, and at just how easily this early version of Terragen made it for anyone to create a very believable scene. The ease of use, in other words, was impressive. I have the settings used, available here. You can basically recreate the above picture, for yourself.

Called this, Lake 3 (don't think I had a lake #1). Decided to try both an obviously synthetic terrain, and some unusual lighting. Interesting image, I think, even so. (The terrain is just the seamless background found here, called Brown Tube 2.)

I saved the settings, which you can use to try and recreate this scene, if you'd like.

I believe the terrain used, here, was in fact the image or scene, Lake 3, just above. The bumpy hills on the left are the water - the waves. Looks convincing, though; if a little weird.

Played around with the atmosphere compression setting, which Terragen uses to produce a sort of ground fog. Brightened up the settings, compressed the atmospheric blue, as well, and it's a high contrast, bright scene, to say the least.

I saved the settings, which you can use to try and recreate this scene, if you'd like.

This also uses the generated scene, Lake 3 (with a little smudging), as a terrain for another image. The bumpy hills to the right are the lake, or waves, from Lake 3.

I saved the settings, which you can use to try and recreate this scene, if you'd like.

And I also created a quick and dirty little fly-by over the terrain, which uses the Bink player, mentioned above (tried to keep the file small).

This one is for Terragen 8.11. It saves much more in the single 'world' file. Played around with the atmosphere compression setting, again, to get the foggy backdrop, and a green tint for the water. Also used in a little artistic rendering, here, as well.

I saved the settings, which you can use to try and recreate this scene, if you'd like.