Planetside updates Terragen to version 2.5.5.0

Terragen™ 2 is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. With the help of Terragen you can create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets and use Terragen 2 to create the most realistic visualisations possible. You can control everything, weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons and stars. You have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micro polygon displacements, clouds and object distributions. Terragen is not in general a 3D program to render anything, the developers focused more than a decade to specialising in algorithms that simulate skies, outdoor lighting, terrain textures, and to render extremely large and detailed terrains. Between the most impressive features of Terragen 2 belongs the possibility of render millions of plants and other objects using instancing (billions of virtual polygons are handled with ease) and 3D painting of colours and masks that can control almost anything in the scene.

The new update is ready for download for all licensed users of the full edition with some bug fixes and other enhancements. For everbody else, version 2.5 of the Free Non-commercial Edition is now ready to download.

Terragen 2 features:

• Hybrid micropolygon renderer optimised for large displacements and very large landscapes.
• Render entire planets, sweeping vistas, tiny rock gardens, or anything in between.
• Export high resolution objects from displaced surfaces.
• Import 3D objects for rendering.
• Render millions of plants and other objects using instancing. Billions of virtual polygons are handled with ease.
• Add multiple heightfields, textures and displacement maps to your scene.
• Georeferencing options; automatic georeferencing for properly formatted GeoTIFF files.
• Procedural terrains that can span an entire planet.
• Apply almost "infinite" fractal detail to terrain and other objects.
• Overhanging terrain using procedural displacements, image-based displacements, or imported geometry.
• 3D painting of colours and masks that can control almost anything in the scene.
• Photorealistic atmosphere and sunlight.
• Volumetric clouds or fast "2.5D" clouds.
• Global illumination, multiple scattering in volumetrics, full light interaction between volumetrics and surfaces.
• Production quality anti-aliasing and motion blur that renders quickly and efficiently.
• High dynamic range output; generate photorealistic environment maps and IBL sources.
• Node graph editor for ultimate control over shaders and textures.
• Flexible planetary shading pipeline.
• Animation of almost any parameter with the optional Animation module.

Build 2.5.5.0 includes:

• More robust OBJ reader
• Corrected normals on the Card object
• Heightfield Shader "stepped" mode now works (fixed a crash)
• Fixed a crashing bug when moving keys in the Dope Sheet
• Mac only: Fixed a 64 bit problem with writing TGOs
• Mac only: The 64 bit PPC version works again
• Fixed bug that would prevent populations from knowing they need to repopulate
• Fixed the problem where cloud layers or atmospheres were not positioned and scaled correctly after changing a planet's position or radius
• Other user interface improvements

If you're updating from Terragen 2.4, Terragen 2.5 brings significant new import and export functionality. Industry standard FBX format is now supported for both import and export, and can include cameras, lights and nulls - all with animation - as well as terrain geometry. In addition, Nuke .CHAN files can now be exported from Terragen as well as imported.

Significant changes in 2.5 include:

• Export of camera, lights, nulls and animation to FBX format
• Export of camera data to Nuke .CHAN format
• Export of terrain data to FBX format
• Import of cameras, lights, nulls and animation from FBX
• New Card node that can be populated and used for billboards

Import/Export

FBX is now supported for import/export of cameras, lights, nulls and terrain geometry export from the Micro exporter. Animation is supported. There will be documentation in the Planetside Wiki. FBX is not available for PPC Macs.

• Camera can export a Nuke Chan file.
• After selecting an import filename or export filename with a file dialog, camera asks if you want to import/export now.

Objects

• A new Card object node has been added. This node is similar to the Plane object in that it's essentially a flat rectangle but it should be easier to use. It can also be populated. By default it's upright with the origin at the bottom centre to facilitate its use as a billboard.
• Grass clump and Rock objects no longer have a "Flip normals" parameter. This parameter was not respected previously anyway.

Shaders

• Painted Shader now allows non-diffuse components of its input (such as reflections and luminosity) to pass through where there is no paint. Previously the Painted Shader would replace all of the surface with a diffuse surface.
• Mac only: Fixed a 64 bit problem which caused the 64 bit Mac version to have problems reading and writing Painted shaders which were saved with a 32 bit version of TG2 and vice versa. If you use the Mac version and have problems loading a project file with Painted shaders that loaded with a previous version then please contact support.
• Fake Stones Shader has an option "apply colour" to enable or disable the application of colour. Attached surface shaders will still work regardless of this setting.
• The Simple Shape Shader now allows you to apply the main and edge colours independently.
• Fixed a bug where newly created nodes could incorrectly display an animation icon in the network view (bug 428).
• Camera nodes now have a movie camera type object drawn in addition to the frustum in the 3D Preview.

Rendering

• The render node's Detail slider has a maximum value of 0.8. You can still enter higher values by hand.
• Fixed a problem that was preventing rendering images with greater than 178,956,970 pixels.
• Corrected ray intersection bug with perfectly flat, level planes.
• Fixed a bug related to reading GI cache files which could sometimes cause a crash and possibly other unusual behaviour.

General

Animation buttons for animated params now show a small coloured dot in the top left of their icon. This is mainly so that params without text fields can show when they're animated. The colour of the dot respects the Animated and Keyframed parameter text colours in the Interface Colours prefs.

• -cropoutput command line option. Crops the output image(s) to the dimensions of the rendered region (defined by "crop region" and/or -tilex, -tiley), i.e. does not pad to the full image dimensions.
• Mac only: Fixed a problem which would cause TG2 to crash on startup when the system language used a non-Roman alphabet.
• Windows only: Made some changes to better support Windows 8.
• Windows only: Made a change to the way OpenGL fonts are found. Fonts in the network view and animation panel should no longer be italic on Windows 8.

More information at: Planetside