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