Terragen 2.2 isn't what I was hoping

[jo]

Hi,

Not all the work over the time since the previous release has gone exclusively into what is in this current release. For example a lot of work has gone into getting a 64 bit version up and running. There are also a number of other things (new UI and nodes etc.) which will likely be going into the next release which were developed during the last release cycle.

We can't do everything that everyone wants although we try our best :-). With limited resources we need to prioritise some features over other features. Some of the things you've mentioned are items we have planned as part of specific releases.

Regards,

Jo

[rcallicotte]

Jo,

I hope the animation module is one of these things, since it has long been promised.  But, I can wait.  No push from me. 

Let us know, though, please.

There are also a number of other things (new UI and nodes etc.) which will likely be going into the next release which were developed during the last release cycle.

[MrHooper]

I'll simply reiterate the basic premise, that I think wider customer adoption is being limited by being too closed a box.  Helpful exports for geo and image data are critical for a pipeline.  This isn't glamorous work, but it's the heart of working in a production.  Pipelines can be built to integrate TG right now, no question.  But each customer must sort of roll their own scripts to deal with lack of export.  Purchase conversion software, hire an intern to deal with the data wrangling.... etc.  But I'll stop here.  You get the idea.

Andrew

[Cyber-Angel]

MrHopper, Sir I must Interject,

You do, of course, realize that Terragen is not aimed at the geophysical and GIS market segments it is to physically inaccurate for that and dose not contain the precision or the data processing tools (Right now) nor the data IO formats to support this; this may change in future, but at the sole discretion of Planetside and no one else, yes users may make them aware of need, but that's about it.

Let us take Satellite data for example you have over fifty different file formats alone for satellite data and that is if your only interested in visible light data, but it gets far worse if you consider far and near inferred, spectral analysis and all the other kinds of data that can be collected (Mission design and Sensor provision dependent) many of these are proprietary any way or are designed to run on operating systems such as IREX.

Dependent on sensor load out, you can be talking about 100+ channels of data and that is even if you handle if off line rather than real-time, I cannot see why Terragen needs to handle it since this is not its market segment as far as I am aware.

GIS, has at least Fifty+ formats again many of these are proprietary, survey work produces vary large data sets alone, TG2 is not in the same market segment of World Builder, designed for things like Civic Planning and Golf Course Design, TG2 fits into the Market Segments of Digital Art Creation and Digital Asset (Also called Digital Content) Creation (DA[C]C).

What kind of pipeline did you have in mind? Because it sounds like you envision TG2 been adopted into a wider market band then is its primary market? TG2 has already been used in a number of motion pictures, shorts, and commercials and is likely to be so in the future, all good things come to those that wait. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel                                    

[Hetzen]

I would guess he's in the CG animation world with what he's said so far. That said, it is entirely possible to output all of what he's asking for right now, it's just more work than he/we would like.

I have a camera rig saved as a TGC I use to create HDRI sky box plates, and a preset PDF to attach the six sides together to port into Max. I've not really needed DoF, as what I've tended to need has motion blur on and doesn't really interfier with the foreground, but that being said, there's nothing stoping you setting up a TGC preset that has a distance shader attached to a surface layer to do this for you. As for an AO pass, again you can set this up with the environment light and a surface layer. Casting shadows can be done in your 3d app with an exported HF. etc.

What TG has over other landscape apps, is it's stability and 'real' look if you manage to master the tools at your disposal. It took me a good week of production time to suss out how to get camera data from a 3d app into TG, which now takes me minutes as I've worked out the process.

There are limits on what you can do, but I think the programs strengths far out way them, it's up to you to find a work around, or simply ask a question here. I would even challenge some of your top 5 as actually being low priority, as you can already do them. Although I would say importing obj sequences would be very usefull, especially if you're playing around with anything reflective.

[Oshyan]

Andrew, I just want to mention that we're getting a lot more interest from vfx production houses these days - something we've been working toward for a while - and we definitely recognize the needs of these users (including yourself) and want to address them as best we can. We do have most of the features you are interested in somewhere in our plans for the future.

In the meantime I think some documentation of the workflows people have developed would also help a lot. We would like to provide more coverage of the recommended approaches, but it's challenging because there are so many different applications and processes to potentially address. There are various threads around which do cover a few solutions, but consolidating this stuff in the wiki would be great. Perhaps an enterprising person can tackle that at some point.

- Oshyan

[Hetzen]

I guess I could write something to help out. It'll be a week or so before I start on it.

[Tangled-Universe]

I guess I could write something to help out. It'll be a week or so before I start on it.

Looking forward to that

[Matt]

I recognise most or all of these requests as ones that we plan to address. Oshyan's reply said most of what I'd like to say at this point. But I want to talk about the "matte objects" request.

Holdouts, or mattes that punch a hole in the RGB and alpha channels, are possible simply by attaching a Constant Shader to your object and giving it colour = 0, alpha = 0. Whether you also want the object to cast shadows or be visible to reflection/refraction/GI rays, these can be set in the object parameters (although reflection/refraction/GI are all lumped under "other rays").

If you simply mean the alpha channel, this can be saved from the Render View as of v2.2, and the ability to save an alpha channel has always been available through the "Extra output images" option in the Render Settings, provided you render using "Render Sequence" button or render from the command line.

Let me know if you want some other kind of matte.

Matt

[Goms]

IMHO TG2 is developing pretty fast for the amount of manpower involved in this process.
Of course there are features someone wants to see implemented, but this will always be the case.
just to name two features: fractal erosion (as there's just no solution for this as far as i know [yes, Dmytry Lavrov got something there, but i talked to him a little bit and its basically a normal erosion algorithm that is applied while rendering and iterations limited to a certain amount of memory as far as i know.]) and a fractal blur function.

regarding output formats, you may take in account that every non-free output format added costs money, which will make TG2 more expensive.

[sjefen]

I'm just gonna slip a question in here.
Is the "preview window" gonna have multicore rendering support sometime soon?

- Terje

[AP]

I think at least having the alpine shader fully pluggable would allow for faking certain types of erosion. Vue's eroded rocky mountain fractal has some interesting features as well.

[Hetzen]

The Alpine Shader is awesome. It maybe slow, but if used properly, it can give you all sorts of erosion effects. The key is not to think of it as bumps of mountains.

[AP]

At a basic level, the faked erosion effects are simple. What can be done is opening up the disposition types as one example to be allowed to have other shaders connected to it. However, imagine every component being opened up. One had to realize that there are varying degrees of erosive geomorphologies along the same localized terrain. The alpine shader does sedimentary carry-out disposition but no fanning of the dispositions nor does it have a way to thin out and meander it's way downward slope. The rest of the shader does a basic fine-scale cutting based on fluvial effects but that is all. It's too much to simulate these effects but make it plugged and a lot of faked effects can at least get one step closer to realism. In fact, it would be cool to have several layers of effects all within the same shader, mixed by slope and elevation blends.

[Hetzen]

At a basic level, yes. You're right. But if I wanted to simulate lower detail, I'd maybe want to create a mask in something like GeoControl or WorldMachine2, that I'd apply to the fractal landscape in TG. I'd keep the infinite relief resolution of TG in the render, but have the external erosion simulation as a mask.

It's not perfect. But we often have to pick the camera viewpoint as our guide, and work accordingly. Otherwise we'd have to deal with a lot of off screen redundant calculations.