I have some questions

[green_meklar]

I have the free versions of Terragen 0.9 and Terragen 2 (please don't think I'm cheap), and recently I somehow managed to figure out enough of the latter to actually make a few images. I'm quite fascinated with Terragen 2's abilities and capacity for realism, but I'm afraid the program is highly counterintuitive and I have a few questions I thought maybe someone could clear up for me. Okay, so maybe it's a lot of questions. It's not my fault I'm a noob!

- Generally I prefer to render my images overnight, because nighttime is usually the longest block of time during which I don't use my computer. This timespan is normally about 9 to 10 hours long. I hope you didn't just eat, because my computer's processor is an Intel Celeron which says it runs at 1300 megahertz, and it has 256 megabytes of real RAM and about 1024 megabytes of page file space split evenly among two separate hard drives. It is running Windows XP Professional, and background processes include Windows Live Messenger, Steam and possibly a few others. Is there any way I can calculate a fairly accurate measurement of the time it will take to render a particular image? What kinds of settings would you suggest to achieve the maximum quality while minimizing the wear on my hard drives, without going over 10 hours?

- I tried importing a heightfield made in World Machine. After a while I even figured out how to get rid of part of the heightfield forming a square depression in my ground. However, I still have a problem. Sometimes when I open the TGD file, the preview and render will refuse to show the heightfield at all. So far it appears that this is inconsistent, that is to say it can change despite absolutely no changes to either the TGD file or the heightfield file (including filename and directory). Is there anything I can do to make sure that the program consistently reads and displays the heightfield properly?

- My first couple landscapes turned out okay, however I recently tried setting a lateral displacement on my terrain and the result looked rather odd (both in the preview and when rendered). Is there some trick to making overhanging cliffs that actually LOOK like overhanging cliffs and not like buggy computer graphics? The lateral displacement menu option said 'requires computed normal'. Does that mean I have to put the displacement shader after a compute terrain shader and then put another compute terran shader after that before I get to the surface layers? Is a displacement shader even the right thing to use at all?

- I heard somewhere that someone was implying that with the free version, I am limited to no more than three object populations. Is this correct? If so, is the limit on populations, or only object files (that is to say, can I have four populations of the same TGO or OBJ file)? I have not tested this yet.

- I downloaded the free Xfrog plants from their website. I read that the fifteen objects in this set are composed of three species of plants, three ages of each species. Each tree object is marked with a, m or y and each flower object is marked with 01, 02 or 03. Which plant ages do a, m, y, 01, 02 and 03 correspond to?

- I've tried importing two of my own OBJ files which I made in Art of Illusion. The first one worked perfectly (or at least as perfectly as could be expected). The second one, however, contains a number of 'spikes' sticking off the model which were not present in the AOI file (Art of Illusion's native format). These exist whether or not I choose to subdivide smooth surfaces during the export process, and no matter what quality setting I put for the population. Is this a problem with the way Art of Illusion exports OBJ files, or a problem with the way Terragen 2 imports them? If the latter, is there anything I can do to correct it?

- Another OBJ problem: The first OBJ file I made to try in Terragen 2 had two images to go with its associated MTL file. After I updated to the newest version of Art of Illusion, the program would no longer make any images for the MTL file for my new object. I took a look at the two MTL files and reverse engineered the image syntax in order to make an image for one of the textures on my new object, which worked. However, the texture appears far too small when rendered in Terragen 2. Is there any way for me to scale up the texture in Terragen 2 or in the MTL file itself so that it appears the proper size when rendered? Would scaling the object itself down help at all, and if so, if I scaled other objects (like trees) down to match the new scale, would THEIR textures get messed up in any way?

- Is it possible to make waterfalls in Terragen 2, without using objects? If so, is it possible to do it EASILY? If so, how is it done?

Sorry for being such a pathetic, worthless noob. I may not have much time, so don't be surprised if I can't post responses to any answers I get. Also, don't be surprised if I come up with more questions in the future. Thanks in advance!

[Seth]

welcome ! you're in the right place for getting answers !
though not from me cuz' i'm still a noob like you !
hope you'll find good teachers in here soon ! (no doubt you will)

[Will]

1. Depends on the image. Images with High detail settings (in both node settings and rendering settings) will lead to some long render times.

2. Could you go into more detail on whats happening? It could be any number of things.

3. There are some good tutorials on this, I'll see if I can find them. If not one of the other members will not doubt give you a link.

4. I'm pretty sure it 3 populations total, no matter the obj or tgo, not sure if this effects items that are not part of a population.

5. not a clue, never used them.

6.  hmm could be a problem with displacement, maybe there is a space in the map thats not matching up?

7. are they in the Image file node? if so you can just use the scale, if not you could try adding a transform node that could work.

8. Probably but it would most likely need to involve functions.

[green_meklar]

(in response to Will's post)

1. So far, my node networks have been rather simple. I understand that higher settings can dramatically increase the render times (most especially volumetric clouds). I'm wondering if anyone here can give me a good idea of how to fine-tune my render time and quality so that I don't go over and end up being unable to use my computer for an hour or two (or ten) in the morning.

2. There isn't really any more detail to add. Sometimes when I open the file, the heightfield simply isn't there on my terrain. The white wireframe box that normally goes around the heightfield is also missing. I'm not using any fractal terrain, the heightfield is the only thing affecting the terrain displacement. The colored surface layers still show up normally, and everything else including sky, water and (I believe) object instances also show up normally in both the preview and the final render. It's only the heightfield that vanishes, and so far I haven't found any way of predicting whether it will vanish or not each time I open the TGD file.

4. So you mean I might be able to have lots of individual objects? Hmm...that's nice, except if I recall correctly I tried putting just one individual object in a file, as a test, and it didn't work...

6. How do you mean, a 'space in the map'? I've heard it implied that you can do stuff to objects within the program itself, but I'm not doing that, I merely inserted the population and changed only the population characteristics (including the object scale and quality).

7. What image file node? And if I don't have one, what do you mean by adding a transform node?

8. Okay then. I haven't used functions that much yet. The program is so very counterintuitive, nothing seems to work the way I expect it to work so unlike with Terragen 0.9 I really have to start from the ground up...and it's a long way up...

Looking forward to any more answers!

[Njen]

1. So far, my node networks have been rather simple. I understand that higher settings can dramatically increase the render times (most especially volumetric clouds). I'm wondering if anyone here can give me a good idea of how to fine-tune my render time and quality so that I don't go over and end up being unable to use my computer for an hour or two (or ten) in the morning.

Each scene you will create will have factors that may increase or decrease your render times accordingly. Even the position and orientation of your camera will affect the length of render times. In my experiance there really are five values that have the largest effect on rendertimes: Detail, Antialiasing, GI Detail, GI Quality, and the Quality settings within your Atmosphere and Cloud nodes. Other than the obvious "Lower values will mean shorter rendering times" there isn't too much else to say.

8. Okay then. I haven't used functions that much yet. The program is so very counterintuitive, nothing seems to work the way I expect it to work so unlike with Terragen 0.9 I really have to start from the ground up...and it's a long way up...

Node based systems are very intuitive to those who have used them before, lot's of software use node based systems nowadays. I personally have to disagree with the statement that TG2 is counterintuitive. Having worked with many node based programs, I have to say that TG2 uses many standard concepts of a node based system that make it really easy to get into. Within a few minutes of my first time in TG2, I was getting displaced terrains with clouds and rendering them fine.

Those of you who have not used a node based system will probably say that TG2 is counterintuitive, but then again, everyone has mentioned this the first time they use a node based system in any software. Sure TG2 needs a few UI optimisations, but I wouldn't say it's counterintuitive...maybe you can give us some specific issues for us to help you with?

[red_planet]

Nobody has yet congratulated this person on managing to run XP Pro on a Celeron with only 256 mb RAM.. ...Hats off to you !!

Rgds

Chris

[Will]

good point

[Volker Harun]

Point 1: a testrender of the same resolution at 0.2 quality will last with 0.9 quaitly ~20x longer, at quality 1 ~25x longer.

Point 2: I've heard of it ... and I think it is on the todo list ... reloading the heightfield should help, but.

Point 3: You will not need lateral displacements when using the displacements on high slopes (slope-tab in the surface shader) On slopes you use along normal. Take care that the displacement fractal is not too noisy!

Volker

[green_meklar]

Node based systems are very intuitive to those who have used them before, lot's of software use node based systems nowadays. I personally have to disagree with the statement that TG2 is counterintuitive. Having worked with many node based programs, I have to say that TG2 uses many standard concepts of a node based system that make it really easy to get into. Within a few minutes of my first time in TG2, I was getting displaced terrains with clouds and rendering them fine.

It's not the node-based system that's counterintuitive. I have used both World Machine and Art of Illusion before Terragen 2 and they both use node systems as well. What I find counterintuitive is the names of everything in the program. For example, the word 'shader', which you'd intuitively think would be simply an array of values in two or three dimensions, turns out to cover a wide variety of quite different nodes that do everything from creating cloud fractals to coloring terrain. And that's not all: 'Bluesky exp height' doesn't say what 'exp' means, 'catmull-rom interpolation' could hardly get less informative and 'sample jitter', 'buoyancy from variation' and 'light propogation mix' might just as well be 'x', 'y' and 'z' to the layperson. 'Lead-in scale'- why didn't they just say 'largest scale' the way they said 'smallest scale'? And as for 'unclamped multifractal', it literally sounds like technical jargon deliberately exaggerated for comedic effect, and it almost comes as a surprise that the program is dead serious about it.

Nobody has yet congratulated this person on managing to run XP Pro on a Celeron with only 256 mb RAM.. 8O ...Hats off to you !!

Not my doing, I got this computer third-hand and haven't made any major changes to its operating system, hardware or drivers.

Point 1: a testrender of the same resolution at 0.2 quality will last with 0.9 quaitly ~20x longer, at quality 1 ~25x longer.

Okay, so you say 0.9 quality will take approximately 20 times as long as 0.2 quality...but are you saying that 1 quality takes 25 times longer than 0.2 quality, or 25 times longer than 0.9 quality (500 times as long as 0.2 quality)?

Point 2: I've heard of it ... and I think it is on the todo list ... reloading the heightfield should help, but.

How would I 'reload the heightfield'?

Point 3: You will not need lateral displacements when using the displacements on high slopes (slope-tab in the surface shader) On slopes you use along normal. Take care that the displacement fractal is not too noisy!

Okay, thanks, I'll keep that in mind. It's possible I may have had the displacement fractal too rough, I'll see what happens if I make it smoother and use 'along normal'.

[cyphyr]

Hi and welcome to the forum

I know what your saying with TG being counter intuitive although I would also say that in order to achieve some of the things this program dose they have had to make some fairly radical departures from the normal way of doing things. Don't fret about it though all will become clear in time. As others have said, keeping your render settings down is vital to getting anything actual rendered in a reasonable time frame. This will depend on your desired finished result. At present I don't even think of rendering to print. An A4 sized image at 300 dpi would come in at something like 3000 x 2000 pixels wide and would take an interminably long time to render! I render to a decent screen resolution, max really would be 1200 x 800 but in your case you might want to think about dropping that down lower, maybe to the size of your screen. The things that will impact on render time apart from output size are the render quality, something between 0.5 and 0.8 are good for finals (nobody renders at 1.0 !!). The Anti Aliasing setting can go from 0 - 9, a setting of 3 - 6 will generally suffice (lower is faster, higher is better). GI Relative Detail & GI Sample Quality can GREATLY increase your render times, disable these (setting 0) or leave them both on 1. The other main component to increased render times is the quality settings in your Atmosphere and cloud settings. Low settings can b e noisy, high settings will be smoother. Try between 64 and 128 for clouds and only go higher if you really have to. You don't need ray tracing active unless the terrain is casting shadows onto the clouds.

I don't have much experience with imported hight fields but you may want to see if you can export the height field as a .ter and then re-import that.

SCALE SCALE SCALE
Understanding this is the most important step to getting the results you want. The default measurement in Terragen is meters. You'll notice that the Heightfield generate node is set to 10,000 meters (10Km). Fractals have lead in scale and smallest scale also in meters. Volker Harun posted an excellent tutorial on getting textures to the right scale http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2287.0 Take a close look at this as it may help you with your overhangs. When a value is not represented in meters it is generally a percentage expressed as a value between 0 & 1 (or over or bellow) These are effectively multiplying the input value bay their amount.

It dose all take a bit of getting used to but your in the right place to get all your answers.

I wouldn't try making a waterfall in TG, rather export some data from TG and use another app more suited t partical simulations.

If you have problems with imported objects, firstly check that they use no procedural textures made in the original app and then convert them through the free Poseray app.

Your limited in the free version to three object populations. This means that you can have as many copies of your three selected objects as your three object populations can handle.

Good luck and be sure to post some examples of your work

Richard

[Volker Harun]

The quality time is: (1x1)/(0.2x0.2)=25
Reloading the heightfield: Just reopen the heightfield-file.

[green_meklar]

At present I don't even think of rendering to print. An A4 sized image at 300 dpi would come in at something like 3000 x 2000 pixels wide and would take an interminably long time to render! I render to a decent screen resolution, max really would be 1200 x 800 but in your case you might want to think about dropping that down lower, maybe to the size of your screen.

No, I'm not doing anything for printing. No way my computer would be up for that, it would probably overflow its virtual memory and spend all night writing and reading the hard drive without going anywhere. :\

My screen is set to 1024X768, but so far I've been doing my final renders at 640X480 (and preview renders at about 300X225 or thereabouts).

GI Relative Detail & GI Sample Quality can GREATLY increase your render times, disable these (setting 0) or leave them both on 1.

I understand that 'GI' stands for 'global illumination', which I've seen implied is when you bounce light around a few times rather than tracing just a single light ray for each point. What kinds of quality differences would I see between 1 and 2 and how would that differ from the quality differences between 0 and 1?

The other main component to increased render times is the quality settings in your Atmosphere and cloud settings. Low settings can b e noisy, high settings will be smoother. Try between 64 and 128 for clouds and only go higher if you really have to.

Actually, so far I've been staying well under 64 for cloud quality. I managed to get both some acceptably good (although still subrealistic) clouds as well as some really crappy clouds, so I'm thinking that the density fractal settings are probably quite important in the final cloud realism. One thing I was wondering, how do cloud quality and atmosphere quality interact? If you set one really high and the other really low, how does that compare in terms of image quality and render time to setting them both to medium? Since they seem to be one of the main things that affects render time, it might be very useful to know.

I don't have much experience with imported hight fields but you may want to see if you can export the height field as a .ter and then re-import that.

It already is a TER file to begin with, I saved it as a TER file from World Machine.

If you have problems with imported objects, firstly check that they use no procedural textures made in the original app and then convert them through the free Poseray app.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'using procedural textures in the original application'. I tried exporting the object both with procedural textures and with uniform textures and it didn't create any image files either way. The MTL file doesn't seem to refer to the application or any kind of procedural textures either.

Good luck and be sure to post some examples of your work

I may when I have something that isn't totally embarrassing. So far I haven't made anything that can stand beside the stuff I've seen from people here. Of course my computer might not even be capable of making such images within my time constraints, and my best images will probably be the ones that can look good while remaining computationally simple (i.e., rocky mesas with no plants or water and only a few clouds).

Reloading the heightfield: Just reopen the heightfield-file.

Actually, I did manage to get it to refresh and load into the scene after it failed to load on opening. I went into the original heightfield node and unchecked then rechecked the 'read from file' checkbox and the heightfield popped into existence.

[green_meklar]

Okay, really hate to double post, but there's something else I'm going to need cleared up. It has come to my attention that I really, really do not understand how these shader things work. At times I find myself questioning the idea that they even DO work, although for the time being I'll blame myself before I blame the program designers.

When inserting a population of objects, I keep running into these same problems over and over again with the shaders. The population node has only one input port which I think is called 'terrain shader'. Yet the population node is actually USING two shaders, one for 'sit on terrain' and the other for 'use density shader'. It seems that sometimes if I save the file, exit the program and come back in, the population node will have magically spawned an extra input port. This is inexplicable enough in itself, but there's more. The shaders simply don't do what they say they're doing. As an example, just now I tried limiting the maximum altitude of the tree shader to 250 with a fuzzy zone of 100, and the program neatly sprinkled trees above a certain altitude. And even that's not all. At other times, the population will be placed on a level plane and as a result end up floating in the air over low terrain while intersecting high terrain. If I recall correctly, in one instance, placing and deleting a connection between the compute terrain shader and the population shader would toggle the population between one, existing on a flat plane with proper fractal density, and two, existing on top of the terrain uniformly (i.e., ignoring the fractal density). Given all these mysterious and counterintuitive activities by the nodes, I'm frankly surprised I ever got a population working in the past at all. Just what the (I'm not sure what this place's policy on swear words is) heck is going on here? How does one go about making the population exist in the desired and expected manner?

[Volker Harun]

Well, Mr. or Mrs. Green_Meklar.
This is a point that confused many.

When going for a population, do the following:

• Create the atmospheres and ground surfaces (the last is more important)
• Create your population and place the cursor in the first field of 'Area Centre', move your mouse then to the preview window, approx. where the middle of your population should be.
• Enter the values for X and Z into the 'Area centre' using the 'Tab'-key to switch, leave (!) the Y value 0 or your population will float or drown
• Create a distribution shader to your like.
• Do a 'Populate now' and Preview the instances. Adjust the  length a and b for width and depth of the area of interest.
• Finetuning: If you made displacements in the surface shaders, you might want TG2 to consider these. Default in the 'Terrain Tab' is the 'Compute Terrain' (sit on terrain enabled). This means, that any displacements after the 'Compute terrain' node will not be considered. Safest would be to assign the last of your surface shaders instead. The one just before the 'Planet 01' node.

Render and have fun ,-)
And feel free to ask anytime.

Volker

[dhavalmistry]

1. there is an option to go inside your nodes (if you already dint knew, right click --> Internal Network

2. are you using a surface shader to limit the population or distribution shader....when you add distribution shader it doesnt turn on by itself even though you have specified what to use as blending shader (in this case distribution shader) you have to click on the checkbox that is beside the blending option....