Picogen is/will be a rendering system for the creation and rendering of artificial nature, primarily based on ray tracing.

While the primary purpose of picogen is to display realistic 3d terrain, both in terms of terrain formation and image plausability, it also is a heightmap-creation tool (the underlying basis is a turing complete programming language created just for picogen, but users will get a friendly point/click/drag/drop interface, so no programming skills are mandatory).

The shading system is partially programmable.

Important Note On The Lack Of Releases Recently

Picogen, or more precisely, the core of picogen, is being rewritten. The new "kernel" is called "redshift". It will be more specialized towards terrain ray tracing.

Major points of development include fast previews (ideally in a glimpse), low memory footprint, great quality, and, ease of usability.

To check whether I was lazy or not in the last time, check out http://code.google.com/p/picogen/updates/list , where you can see the time since my last commit :)

Important CVS/Subversion Note

The SVN-repository here on googlecode is a mirror of svn://svn.sv.gnu.org/picogen (see https://savannah.nongnu.org/svn/?group=picogen). To see when it has last been synchronized, see http://code.google.com/p/picogen/updates/list. To get the definite most recent copy, or if you are a developer of picogen, use the savannah host instead.