I used the original Terragen program many years ago to create
skyboxes for games and I have recently downloaded the latest version 3 and wow it feels like I have stepped into the space shuttle, there is a crazy amount of buttons and menu options to play with!
For some reason whenever I look for Terragen 3 tutorials, everything seems to point to Terragen 2, are they similar? Is Terragen 3 so new that there is hardly any tutorials for it? Even the Terragen wiki lists version 2 tutorials?
One thing I have always wanted to do with Terragen is night time skies, I want wispy clouds, a background of stars and a large moon glowing in the sky.
My first problem is trying to create a background of stars. Under the object menu, background object, surface shaders, I create new shader, colour shader, image map shader and finally get to pick my star map. (Wow that is a lot of menu options) Now I assume this is the background image for the whole scene regardless of what direction I look. If I disable the atmosphere I get a black background and no stars. So how does it work? I have the object at 0,0,0 center and when I play with the radius and scale, nothing changes. I tried moving the object around and still get no background image, what type of background image is the default? Ideally I want a sphere with the star map on the inside so it looks different from several angles.
My second problem is trying to create a moon that behaves like the sun and sits in the sky with the relevant elevation and heading. There does not seem to be anyway to substitute an image for the sun. Originally when i created moon lit landscape in Terragen (v1) I rendered a sun and then I added a moon image on top of the final renders. This latest version must have an easier way to create a moon as the primary light source in the sky?
Does Terragen 3 have any macro function to render out a full skybox (6 images)?
If anyone can spare some time to help, I would much appreciate. Thanks