Hedge Maze Tutorial

Some years ago, I ran across a cool program called Knot Maker which uses the author's Knot Maker font to create intricate patterns which look like rope or string twisted into... wait for it... knots. So what does that have to do with Terragen?

Have you ever seen the hedge row mazes which were very popular in Europe hundreds of years ago? Many still survive and new ones have been built all over the world using bushes to full trees to sculpt the walls. The Hedgend Maze and the Bellingham Maze are just two examples.

This tutorial describes how I used Knot Maker to generate mazes and maze-like images in Terragen. Although Knot Maker is no longer available (the author had to take it down for legal reasons), there's another program called Knot Plot which will produce similar patterns, although the program isn't really designed for this and is fairly complicated. You can also use a paint program to generate similar patterns.

1) Using Knot Maker, create a knot. Here you will see I've created two different types of knots. We will use the one on the right.
2) Click Convert to select the knot and save it to a text file.
3) Open the text file in a word processor, select the text and set the font to Knot Maker. Set the font size to be fairly large so it will be easier to use in the next step.
4) Using a screen capture program, get the image of the knot into your paint program. I use Paint Shop Pro which has built-in capture. Trim the image and resize it to end up with a square 257x257 (or one of the sizes used by Terragen).
5) Convert the image to greyscale and fill in the borders. Then, invert the colors. In PSP, use the Negative Image command.
6) Save as .raw (or .bmp if you have Firmament installed in Terragen). Import the image into Terragen. I've adjusted the heights in Modify to go from 0 to 5 tg units. The ground is two layers of brown with a max height of 0.1, while the hedge is two layers of green from 0.1 up.
7) For this image, I set up for an orthographic shot in Camera Settings.
	This tut has shown how to use the entire knot as the terrain. You could plunk the knot terrain into a larger terrain so you can add scenery around it. The possiblities are endless.