Terragen 3 pre-release FAQ

Started by Oshyan, June 13, 2013, 01:46:02 AM

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Antoine

#45
I would like to know if in the new GI engine there is the possibility to adjust the strenght setting on surface in two ways : between objects to objects and sky to objects ? In some cases it could be vey helpfull.

bla bla 2

I would to say, i have terragen 2 deep animation. With the update, it will become terragen 3 professional animation or not ?

TheBadger

Bla Bla, yes. That is my understanding too. YOu will have to buy the upgrade. The upgrade will cost less for you than for a new user.
But of course, I may misunderstand too. In any case, Oshyan said it will be a nice price for all current users! And Im sure it will be. I don't think it will be over the top even for a new user. Planetside has been rather generous about their prices from what I have seen.

OshMan, if your reading this. Can you say something about upgrading from student versions? Don't think I have heard a mention on the topic in few years now.
It has been eaten.

Oshyan

Antoine, I don't think that kind of GI control is available at this point.

Badger is correct regarding upgrades and pricing.

- Oshyan

Bjur

Hi Oshyan, another question:

Layer and render element output.. Is it possible now to integrate/safe all needed layers separately into .exr's for using it in post programs like Nuke for example (especially a layer like z-depth/buffer)? That would be awesome.

~ The annoying popularity of Vue brought me here.. ~

Tangled-Universe

It will be awesome, because yes we can ;)

Oshyan

#51
That's exactly what the render element output feature does, yes. It outputs separate images for each "pass" (element) you select to to save, including the typical depth, alpha, etc. as well as motion vectors, separate lighting passes for atmosphere and surfaces, etc. The Layers functionality allows you to group the scene and output only components from a given group (layer) from a particular renderer, which gives you even more control than just full-scene elements. These two things can be combined, of course.

- Oshyan

Bjur

~ The annoying popularity of Vue brought me here.. ~

Tangled-Universe

Exactly, it's marvelous for correcting stuff in post. Too strong specular? Reduce that layers' visibility. Or more specular? Play with the levels to boost them.
Direct lighting and indirect lighting are separated, allowing you to alter the shadows specifically, or the contribution of GI.

Here's a different example than the one on the Terragen3.com site:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16222.msg158603.html#msg158603

It already shows it's power and I even haven't done it entirely correctly because photoshop can't fully handle EXR for all functions.


Oshyan

Yeah, that's a great example Martin. Nicely laid out to illustrate what you can do. :)

- Oshyan

engineer

Congratulation, the examples are looking  8) and the news are really exciting.

However, what about documentation? Are the TG2 docs still usable or will TG3 docs be at hand?
Will TG3 include the long announced development kit or any kind of macro support?

Tangled-Universe

Current documentation doesn't cover TG3 related creative, logically, but will still be usable for TG3.
You shouldn't worry about migrating from TG2.5 to TG3.
The core fundamentals of creating your scene is still the same (there's no paradigm shift like TG0.9 -> TG2).
However, as you may have noticed, a lot of other stuff is added ;)

Oshyan

We are continuing to update documentation over time. In fact it seems that people have (unfortunately) gotten used to docs not being available and don't check anymore, but the node reference in particular is worth looking at whenever you have a question about a particular setting. It's not complete yet, but expanding all the time (and linked to directly from each node with the ? button).

We unfortunately won't have an SDK yet, nor macro capability. Both will be announced and noted on feature lists when available.

- Oshyan

reck

OK here are my questions. They are to do with current limitation in TG2 that have hopefully been resolved in TG3 for the most part.


  • Are we now able to add displacement to raytraced objects or do we still have to make a trade off?
  • Is the populator now multi-threaded? In some projects this can be the slowest thing to work with and there's a lot of time just waiting.
  • Is the preview windows finally multi-threaded? A lot of the time you might as well forget the the preview and just run low detail full renders instead.
  • Has there been any improvements to clouds? Terragen probably has the best clouds around already but I just wondered if there had been any improvements to make them easier to work with or to improve their look further?

Looking forward to hearing a release date, full feature list and of course upgrade price.

Oshyan

Reck, no displacement does not work on imported objects when raytracing is being used. That would definitely be noted as a semi-significant feature once resolved. Unfortunately the changes needed to make that work well are fairly significant, but it's certainly something we intend to address in the future.

Details on the rest will have to wait a bit, but I think there will be some good news for at least some of those concerns.

- Oshyan