Terragen TOP TIPS

[cyphyr]

Whats your top THREE Terragen tips?

Just for fun really but maybe we might learn something.
I say "three" so everyone gets a chance to add something.
If, after a while, you see a "missing" tip please feel free to jump back in and add it of course.
They can be about anything Terragen related, Heightfield operations, post processing, work flow, node networking etc.

To start the ball rolling here are mine:

1. Save "Iteratively" (scene-01, scene-02, scene-03 etc.) and Save often, cant be stressed enough really. Even with Terragen's updates there are still crashes but more importantly its next to impossible to get back to an earlier setting that looked promising if you have not saved and saved progressive versions.

2. Know your scale. Terragen luckily has several visual tools that come in at a default size. One of these is the Heightfield Generate or Load function that loads at 10,000 meters square. You can change the size of this and get a good idea of the size of the piece of terrain your looking at. You can now scale your shaders accordingly.

3. Drag and Drop Colour Swatches. You can drag and drop one colour swatch to another.

Next

Richard

[dhavalmistry]

Interesting topic.....hmmm lets see....

1. You should never need more than 600, 128 samples for clouds, atmosphere respectively

2. Always keep your node network organized

3. Always do test renders before moving on to final HQ render (this one is kinda obvious)

4. To create interesting renders, try to follow some composition rules like rule of 1/3 distribution

[Volker Harun]

1. Add thick Cirrus-Clouds to lower the contrast of shadows and lighted areas.

For normal clouds:
2. Increase Cloud Density by a factor of 1000, decrease edge sharpness by a factor of 2000.

3. Increase the Contrast inside the Clouds' Density shader

[Saurav]

1. When there are vegetation in the scene, opt for AA of 5 minimum.
2. Do high quality crop renders of different parts of scene before you commit to final render.
3. Edit renders in EXR (HDR) mode.

[sjefen]

This topic is great, but all my best tips are already her
I'll post some other tips I think is good.

1. Cloud quality - I usually don't look at the samples. I just use 1 for quality . At least for my final render.
It may not speed up the rendertime, but you will almost be sure to have good quality on your clouds.

2. Detail to terrain - This may be old news for many of you, but I recently discovered that the heightfield shader
have the option: Fractal Detail. This is a very quick and handy way to get some extra detail to your terrain.

3. Preview window - When I have my shaders ready and are pleased with my angle I'll let the preview window
finish rendering, or reach to detail 80. Then I just hit the pause button and can for example work with my tree population.
I hate it when the preview window starts rendering when I make some changes that really don't affect it anyways.

Next

[Dark Fire]

My tips are random.

1. Always use your imagination.

2. When rendering, if nothing appears after 30 minutes, stop the render and reduce some of the quality settings.

3. If you get bored, don't bother creating new nodes - just connect existing ones in a different order.

[dhavalmistry]

3. If you get bored, don't bother creating new nodes - just connect existing ones in a different order.

LOL

[ProjectX]

1. Experiment with everything. Use nodes in ways in which they weren't originally intended to be used.

2. Always make sure your lighting is interesting, and brings out the scene's strong points

3. Always do crop tests. The preview render rarely shows exactly what you'll get, and your mind has a tendency to fill in the details with something that's beautiful.

[Moose]

1. Volumetric Clouds are Passée - Everyone seems to use them and 95% of the time they don't pass the litmus-test anyway, whilst taking an eternity to render. Cirrus clouds are quick and VERY realistic - plus comparatively fewer works feature them.
2. Cheap Overcast Skies - In the Background Shader for the Background Object, move the colour more towards white. Add a cirrus layer or two to subtly brake things up a little if you need some more definition.
3. Haze and Scale - Often, a contributory factor in outing a scene a fake is the incorrect scale of the scene as suggested by the haze. Too much haze has hills which should be near appearing like distant mountains gone wrong, and vice versa.

[EBAndrew]

1. Multiple Power Fractals can be your friend, if you don't mind paying for it. It's a really easy way to add detail to the terrain, providing you use the Scale, Lead-In Scale and Displacement properly.

2. Know just how high your quality setting should be. Really high samples, detail and anti-aliasing setting can add tons of wasted time to your render.

3. Open nodes that you frequently use and tell them to stay open. Now, in all fairness, this only really works if you have two monitors, but it's still a really handy thing to do. I generally set one of the render windows to stay open so I can adjust the camera and detail settings without leaving the terrain window so I can make faster adjustments.

[rcallicotte]

1. Contrast is your friend - Using the Render Effects Contrast setting can be to your advantage by even a small increase.  This is because the human eye makes differentiations that your picture might not pick up.  This is best used in correlation with Render Effects Gamma Correction.  An example - .5 Contrast; 1.8 Gamma Correction.

2. Blue skies are beautiful - Just a blue sky without one cloud can be a marvelous site.  Some settings (learned from many on this site and through experimentation) -

Atmosphere, Main tab - Haze Density: 1.25
Atmosphere, Height Control tab - Haze Exp Height - 5000
Atmosphere, Lighting tab - Haze Glow Power - .35
Atmosphere, Lighting tab - Blue Sky Glow Power - .35
Atmosphere, Tweaks tab - Fake Dark Power- .2
Atmosphere, Tweaks tab - Bluesky Density Colour- 1.33
Atmosphere, Quality tab - Number of Samples - 32 to 64

These work best with the contrast settings in the first suggested tip.

3.  Two-in-One -
Terrain - Many of you know this, but it's a good suggestion for beginners.  Try using the Merge Shader to link a Fractal Terrain with a Transform Shader to create your base terrain rather than depending upon the TG2 default Terrain.  I prefer to feed this sort of setup into a Compute Terrain node.
Group -  Create groups for even seemingly simple node networks (like the one just mentioned).  This keeps your work neat and helps to organize clip files.  Another idea that I learned from Volker is you can insert a newly created group (or clip file) inside of the target node's Internal Network to keep things even neater and better organized.

I included the last two as two in one, since these are already practiced by some of the "old-timers" here and could be useful for some of the newer (or slower, like me) guys.

[reck]

lt Terrain.  I prefer to feed this sort of setup into a Compute Terrain node.
Group -  Create groups for even seemingly simple node networks (like the one just mentioned). 

How can I group nodes together? Can I select a bunch of nodes (shift click) and then press some shortcut key to group them all under a parent node?

[rcallicotte]

Right-click in the node network area to create a Group (from Other).  Then take a group of nodes you have created for a special purpose, select them each with the mouse while holding the shift key and drag them into this group.  Right-click on the Group header to do Group: Capture Nodes.  You can also select the settings of this Group and change its name and color.

I don't know of any way to shiift-click like what you're saying to group them like that.

If you wonder about putting a group inside of a group of nodes, select all of the nodes you want to move (or the Group) and then Ctrl-X (cut) and then right-click on the node where you wish to use these nodes to select Internal Network.  Once inside the Internal Network of the target node, do Ctrl-V (paste).  You might need to back up some (Alt-Middlemouse) in the Internal Network to see your newly pasted nodes.

lt Terrain.  I prefer to feed this sort of setup into a Compute Terrain node.
Group -  Create groups for even seemingly simple node networks (like the one just mentioned). 

How can I group nodes together? Can I select a bunch of nodes (shift click) and then press some shortcut key to group them all under a parent node?

[reck]

Oh I get you. I was thinking of something else. I thought you could put nodes "inside" a parent node, as in an internal network and group nodes like that. This way you would only see the parent node, but you could look at it's internal network to it's child nodes, exactly how objects work. When you have lots and lots of nodes this could be a nice feature as you could group (place) nodes together and create more space.

[rcallicotte]

Yes.  This is what I am saying.  By saying "target" node, I mean the node that you want these nodes to target.

Oh I get you. I was thinking of something else. I thought you could put nodes "inside" a parent node, as in an internal network and group nodes like that. This way you would only see the parent node, but you could look at it's internal network to it's child nodes, exactly how objects work. When you have lots and lots of nodes this could be a nice feature as you could group (place) nodes together and create more space.