Please Terragen devs, Importing VDB should be a priority for you guys now.
Vue has it and pretty much most of the standard major 3D packages.
Personally I only have a license of Lightwave, but uses Blender more and more right now.
Ivé been on and off wrestling with the Disney free WDA cloud asset trying to emulate the look you get from Disneys hyperion render.
Lightwave isn´t there with it´s GI volume bounces, and blender does a decent job at getting the VDB to look nice, but it still can not match the wonderful scattering that takes place in hyperion with the powder effect.
Now since Terragen supposedly should have a better scattering function to emulate similar to that of hyperion, it would have been great to try it out.
what I would prefer than the other way around, so pity the import function wasn´t there before the export, I will have more use of
importing a vdb designed, fluid or modeled volume in to Terragen than exporting cloud volumes from Terragen, so I kind of think vue did the right thing with implementing VDB import.
Personally I can both sculpt or model clouds, or use gas solver for cloud fluid sims in lightwave, or use blender for cloud modeling with fluid sims, to create the "hero" clouds, or use houdini´s cloud fx to paint, or model or fluid sim the cloud volumes, all these final created cloud volumes can be shared acroos all these platforms, going from houdini to lightwave, houdini to blender, lightwave to houdini, lightwave to blender, from blender to lightwave, from blender to houdini..
So a simple vdb import would enhance the way you can design your cloudscapes in Terragen enourmously..and it will help designers, artists, visual effects artist to complete what is needed, and not just relying on.."that is not how nature does it"
The limitations of not being able to design the cloudscapes as you want ..that is a limitation, not an option.
here´s a link to
blenderartist.org, where I have started a thread around shading the asset..
https://blenderartists.org/t/vdb-wda-disney-cloud-scattering-tests/1227871My profile over there is MI65
And my profile at newtek is prometheus.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PrometheusPhamarus/videosI rather look in to getting a terragen license than vue someday(but vue has som major features Terragen hasnt, including VDB import), but that day isn´t still after many years here, there are too many features missing or UI workflows that are missing that I think is necessary for me before a purchase, I will rack these issues up and link with descriptions on where I think terragen could simply rise to another level, and ergo will probably get a lot more attention and licenses sold, in the end it will probably be a matter of intention, and having enough coding guys to work it out, which by no means tells anything about it being easy to do.
