Pretty nice beach scenes are quite difficult to achieve using just Terragen. It is more or less at random that a real flat and natural beach will be generated. To come to better results the Firmament plugin and the SOPack plugin together with a paint program like Paintshop Pro, Picture Publisher etc. could be used. Both plugins are available at http://www.terradreams.de or at http://www.terragen-web.de. In the following I would like to describe a methode by using the Firmament plugin.
At first you should create a new image with your paint program (8 bit greyscale bitmap) - a size of 513 x 513 would be best - coloured in black completly. For the next step you should choose a big brush adjusted to max. blurring to paint the beach. It might be that you have to change the brightness of your monitor to detect the colour of the painted beach. A very smooth margin of the painted arae is important to get a smooth slope of the beach later on. Additionally the colour you will use is important. In my example I have choosen RGB 25/25/25. If you are ready with this the image should be saved using the BMP format.
Now you should start Terragen and at first you should change the terrain size to 513 x 513 pixels. For this you should click at the big button below the landscape preview in the Landscape Window. Afterwards you are able to choose the new terrain size in the dialogue Landscape Settings. Terragen will mention that a bigger terrain size will need more memory and will result in longer render time, but that will be OK and you should acknowledge this. The following message you can choose "NO" and you will be ready to close this dialogue by clicking at the OK button.
Now you can import your image with the just created beach by clicking at the button Accessories and selecting Firmament BMP Import. Therefor you should select the image file and you should click at the button FI. The following question regarding scaling you should confirm, the default value of 10% is not bad.
Now you can generate a new terrain with some mountains not to far away from the shore line, just to limit the width of the beach later on. Due to the already positioned point of view it is fairly easy to check this, which means generate a terrain - check - generate - check wherefore the preview of the window Terrain Combination might help to supervise this. It will be no problem, if there will be some mountains close to the shore line or in the water because you can use the sculping tool to get rid of them. And this will be the next step after having success with the terrain generation. But first you should save the unchanged terrain because so you can go back and correct your sculpting work in case of something will go wrong.
The leftmost image above shows the beach painted with the paint program. The black area will be filled with water at the end. In reality the grey is not as bright as shown and will be visible with an adjusted monitor only. In the middle the image shows the unchanged terrain generated with Terragen. The image on the right shows the terrain after removing unneeded mountains.
After clicking at the button Combine With in the window Terrain Combination on the topmost preview the beach and on the other one the by Terragen combined landscape including the beach. If this will fit with your ideas you should select Highest at the area titled Method and afterwards you should click at Modify Terrain. Now both terrains will be combined to one resulting landscape. To detect the shore line you have to adjust your monitor probably. Now you should look for the height of your beach by passing with the cursor across this particular area in the terrain preview. At the status area of the window Landscape below the preview you are able to read the z value which means the height. A good value to start with would be the average of the heighest value and the lowest value of the beach area because in this case you will have some smooth terrain below the water (e.g. to be used by the plugin Euphotica). In my example I found 30m to be ideal and I have used this value as Water Level inside of the window Water.
This was the last step and now you are ready with the creation of a basic beach landscape. All the rest is just a question of colouring by using the surface map. I you need some hints and tips you may want to have a look at my Tutorial covering this.
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