Poor viewport preview quality

[rawalanche]

Hello

i currently started to evaluate Terragen as one of the candidates for possible aid to environment creation for VFX. While i found interface and features to be quite good, i have a big struggle with preview viewport quality. It always progressively tessellates terrain to the level which is insufficient for preview purposes. I was not able to find the setting for increasing geometric detail of viewport preview. I looked everywhere.... in preferences, in quick render settings and in generator nodes, but no luck.

At this detail level, it is extremely difficult to tell what i am looking at, so if there was for example some fine erosion detail, i would not see it.



If course all the necessary detail can be viewed via full featured renderer, but re-rendering after every change is not really an option, as i am looking for an interactive workflow. WorldMachine wins so far, because it can generate realtime preview at far better quality.

I will be very thankful for any suggestions on how to improve viewport quality.

Thanks in advance.

[Oshyan]

Unfortunately there is no way to increase the preview quality at this time (and if there were it would just take longer). We'll be improving things in future versions, but for now what you have is the best that can be done. If your purposes are purely terrain generation and you don't intend to actually render in Terragen, then World Machine may be more appropriate anyway, regardless of the preview quality. You can also use World Machine together with Terragen, first creating your terrain in World Machine, then importing to Terragen, adding objects, atmospherics, clouds, etc. and rendering out sequences. But again, if your goal is simply to get terrain that you will render in some other application, World Machine is more of a dedicated terrain editor anyway.

- Oshyan

[jaf]

I know you all get tired of me writing about this, but I still haven't heard a good argument against it.  If it's possible, why not offer the option to NOT clear the render window when crop rendering is active?  One could make "test strips" by doing a render, entering crop mode, and moving the crop window across the render window (as changes are made.)

[ajcgi]

I think in addition to that, ideally it should use more than one thread. I remember that caused instability a while back though. However on multi-core machines it seems like a waste to not use at least half the cores. That would get the preview up to quality a bit faster.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

this bothers me too sometimes, especially when using the painted shader for doing masking.
maybe in future version there could be a toggle for switching between the regular 3D preview and a Hi Quality Preview.

i agree with ajcgi, it would be useful for it or other features to use multiple cores.