Aspiring New User here for Info

[Mistro]

Hello everyone. I am thinking of making a purchase of Terragen 3 sometime soon. I'm a Sketchup Pro and Thea Render user. I also use Blender mainly for large scenery but I'm looking for a good program dedicated to making natural worlds from up close to planetary levels. This program looks like a great candidate. But I have some questions.

1. How long are the average renders of a mountainous scene with many trees?
2. Does T3 support custom imported meshes in various formats at scale with minimum problems?
3. Does the render engine use CUDA as well as CPU?
4. Can I export a scene/file from T3 to use in external render engines? Are there any plugins for other renderers?

Thanks in advance.
-Dennis

[Dune]

Welcome to the forum, and I hope you'll be getting TG3. But why not start with the free version and see for yourself what can be done?
Hard to say how long an 'average render' takes, it very much depends on the detail settings, size, and amount of water, use of a compute terrain (which is not always necessary) and atmosphere. And your machine specs! Some high quality 1200x1920px renders I can do in 30mins (or even less), others takes quite a few hours and that is on an i7.
Importing meshes can be done, best in obj, atm.
I don't know about CUDA.
And exporting is not possible, I think, but the TG renderer is very good in many ways!

Others will undoubtedly chime in.

[Oshyan]

1: "Average" render time is extremely hard to judge because it depends not only on the details of the scene setup (how many cloud layers, how much displacement, etc.), but also the specs of your machine of course. I suggest checking out our benchmark results and running the benchmark yourself on the TG3 Free version: http://planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-benchmark
Ulco's examples of render times are reasonable. With a rather simple scene (simple texturing, but lots of tree populations perhaps), you could certainly have 20-30 minute renders at 1080p, depending on settings (e.g. some trees are harder to AA than others).

2. As Ulco mentioned, OBJ is currently the best method to use for importing objects. OBJs must have an accompanying .MTL file to assign texture references and UVs.

3: The render engine is CPU-only. CUDA and other GPU acceleration is not going to be available in the near future, although we are certainly interested in it.

4. You cannot export a complete scene at this time, nor are there any plugins for other renderers. You can export terrain-only however (no textures). Terragen's procedural functions, texturing, and atmospherics (volumetric clouds, etc.) are all finely tuned and developed specifically for rendering within Terragen's proprietary render engine. You will always get the very best results rendering these elements in TG. If you want to render an object that TG doesn't import very well, or some element like hair that TG doesn't currently support, your best bet would be to export a spherical environment map from TG and use that to light your object and render it in another app, then composite that with the TG rendered backplate.

I definitely echo Ulco's recommendation to try the free version as it is a good representation of how TG works and what you can achieve:
http://planetside.co.uk/products/download-terragen-3

- Oshyan