This is an update to Terragen 4.8 to fix some bugs that have come to light. You can find the original 4.8 release here.
Important Bug Fix: Clouds in Path Tracer
There was a bug when rendering Easy Cloud and Cloud Layer V3 types with the Path Tracer that added significant noise in some situations. While the Path Tracer is not used to render clouds directly visible to the camera, it nevertheless altered their appearance wherever the clouds were occluding surfaces (e.g. terrain or objects).
In a typical landscape scene this could add a strong discontinuity in the noise levels from above the horizon to below the horizon, and made the adaptive sampler work harder to resolve the noise in the affected areas, usually increasing render times. The bug presented itself only when rendering with the Path Tracer, not the Standard Renderer. Cloud Layer V2 and Planet Atmosphere were not affected in any render mode.
We advise users to adjust render quality settings on scenes that were affected by the cloud rendering bug. Now that the bug has been fixed, renders can take longer in scenes that used high AA or high “Voxel scattering quality” to compensate for the old behaviour. Adjusting render settings back to normal levels should result in higher quality images and shorter render times. A good range for “Voxel scattering quality” (in GI Settings) is between 200 and 400 when the image is dominated by clouds directly visible to the camera, and 100 is better when clouds are mostly for secondary effects.
Improved Z-Depth Rendering in 3D Preview
Improvements have been made to the 3D Preview that potentially affect the way items are drawn in it. The Z-depth buffer is used to hide bounding boxes, wireframes, shaded and textured objects, and some shader-specific drawing attributes like the dotted lines of a Simple Shape Shader. To maintain visibility other shader-specific attributes and some special objects are always drawn on top. Please give us feedback on the new behavior so we can further refine it.
Other Bug Fixes
Terragen was crashing in some situations when using a license server through a configuration file on a network path.
In the Free Non-commercial edition parameter views for object reader nodes (OBJ Reader, TGO Reader etc.) were taking up more screen space than they should, because they were missing the “Mesh Modifiers” tab causing the tab’s contents to be displayed between the two main tab groups.
Sometimes the Path Tracer caused the Robust Adaptive Sampler to output bad pixels if nearby pixels were sampling ‘holdout’ objects. The bug might have caused problems in other situations too.
Fixed bugs in the visual ‘disabled’ status of node outputs and connection lines in the Node Network.
Other internal changes that are not meant to affect outward behaviour.
4.8 builds are available to all users who have a current Subscription or current Maintenance on a perpetual license. If you have a perpetual license and your Maintenance has not expired as of May 5, 2024 this update is still included with your license.
To download the new version or check your Maintenance status just use the Check for Updates option in the Terragen Help/Application menu. Note that Terragen needs access to the Internet for this to work. Alternatively you can login to your account on our website and go to the details and downloads for your most recent Terragen purchase.
Maintenance lasts for one year from your original purchase, and then must be renewed annually to maintain access to updates. If your Maintenance expired before May 5, 2024, you’ll need to renew it in order to access version 4.8 and future updates.
