Planetside Software has released a new version of Terragen, its natural environment modeling, rendering, and animation tool.

Planetside Software has released a new version of Terragen, its natural environment modeling, rendering, and animation tool. The update brings support for OpenVDB clouds, reduced render times for Easy Clouds, a deferred Shading render mode, new adaptive anti-aliasing options, a new Sample Rate render element, and more.

Shaved about a third off calculation times for the colour generated by Power Fractal Shader V3 (colour/value, not displacement). This makes a big difference to render times for Easy Cloud, for example, and is expected to speed up many scenes that use the Power Fractal Shader.

Clouds

Animation of Easy Cloud. A new “Anim” tab on the Easy Cloud node has new features to animate the cloud textures:

• “Drift” simply moves the textures horizontally over time, with controls for speed and direction.
• “Evolution” has a few different options, but they all work by moving textures up or down on the Y axis which creates the impression of change over time.
• “Time warp”. When using any of the animation effects above (Drift or Evolution), normally these are calculated from the distance between the current frame and the reference frame, but this produces animation with a constant speed. “Time warp” allows you to vary the speed during the animation, pause or reverse time, create bounce effects, and so on. You do this by editing the animation curve on the “warped frame number” parameter.

In GI Settings, the default value for “Voxel scattering quality” is now 100, and the slider goes from 0 to 160. Although the optimal value depends on many factors, we’ve found that a value of 100 tends to render higher quality images in a shorter time than the old default of 50. We recommend updating any of your existing projects to use 100.

Planetside Software

You can learn more by studying the online release notes.