Personally i am taking a break from Terragen 2 because i feel that the UI is a bit over whelming at the moment. Trying to take what i do in GeoControl Alpha and place image masks and color overlays over the terrain still gives me alignment and size issues. Perhaps i am just brain dead just not seeing the obvious, i don't know.
I guess i am just waiting for speed improvements (not enough time in the day and my PC overheats easily) and they will come.
Some type of easy way to create advanced shader materials with a preview window that had a shaded object to see what the material looks like. I want to able to plant a camera and move it around in the 3d preview window by just grabbing it with my mouse controls like in Vue or Carrara.
More thoughts...
Preview window with the option of seeing presets in 3D by terrain, flat plain, cylinder, box, triangle and sphere. ?
Needs a navigation window near the preview window to move the camera around freely with navigation like a trackball feature with roll, pitch, yaw, and a arrow navigation button with zoom, up and down.
Procedural Erosion: Fluvial, Glacial, Alluvial, Thermal, Wind, Talus Biuld up - Hard to achieve, i know.
Global River Network System - Hard to achieve.
Overhang/Displacement presets with a preview window seeing what they look like at a side view.
Displacements that can fake Tectonics. It is possible as i had done this in World Machine but not a real issue sense i can import heightfields anyways.
Global Mountain Ranges: Small clusters, Long chains, Range/Basin range and Shorter chains. Need a tutorial or some way to get this down.
Procedural Terrain Paint Brush: With 16bit image imports to shape the brush. Also would use procedurals to paint. ?
Object Painter: Paint 3D Imported objects, Procedural Stones and Clouds.
Can work over a map in orthographic view and can be zoomed in and out to easily
see where the objects are being painted and a overall idea on what scale the user
wants the objects painted on.
Objects can be limited by Elevation, Slope, Mask, Amount, Scattering Size, Overall
Size per object selected. I WISH!
Soft Shadows.
Island Generator: Clusters, Size, Scatter, Chains etc. Wild Idea!
Presets for Stones like Boulders, Smaller Rocks, Beach Pebbels, River Bed
Pebbels, Flaky Stones, Lava Rocks, Rigid Stones, Cracked Stones and Smooth
with some kind of stone shaper editor in a preview window.
Water Shader: Full transparency: Being worked on.
Fresnel: ?
Foam, Spray and Cresting Waves: The foam we know is possible via TG09
Caustics: ?
Global Lake Shader: May just correspond to the River Network System as rivers fill into lakes and also drain into the ocean. Wild Idea!
Improved Crater Shader: Planetary scale, Ejecta size, Overall size, Scattering, Jittering size and
Scatter, Depth, Height.
Waterfalls: Mentioned in the FAQ.
Additional Fractal Shaders: Like Chipped Slate, Unique Dune Patterns...
Atmosphere:
Global Weather System types: Presets, Global Cloud Coverage, Hurricane addition with storm
strength settings (See LunarCell) Tropical Storm addition (See
LunarCell), Jet Stream addition, Weather systems can be set up by
use of a flat map representing the planet and drawn by use of
splines representing global wind patterns in straight direction and
drawn circles representing rotating storm systems: circles can be
moved about the map, multiplied, scattered and resized.
It's like using vector drawing to set up
weather patterns: I talked to Matt about this back in 2004 i
think and nvseal has got something real nice going with this.
Rainbows: ?
Sun Dogs: ?
Halos: ?
Lighting:
Add new light types: Spot Light, Light Gel, Area Light, Local Volumetric Light, Make object into Light.
Simple Lens Flair System: Nothing over the top like Knoll Light Factory.
Sun: Aura, Color Ramp, Solar Flairs (See Flaming Pear Filter: SolarCell)
Clouds:
Presets representing all of the cloud types known: ?
Cirrus needs to be worked on to look more like the real thing: ?
Cumulonimbus: Needs thunderheads with flattening on tops that turns to Cirrus: Possible with
collision detection at a certain altitude. Wild Idea!
Camera:
Spherical
Isometric
Wide Angle
Macro
Orthographic
Panoramic
Well, this turned into a wish list i guess. I'll shut up now.