Quote from: dorianvan on October 18, 2019, 06:56:10 PMFirstly, can TG export an object of a fake stone correctly? I'm having difficulty doing this.
Dorianvan can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming he's talking about exporting a Rock object from Terragen?
If that's so, it is possible in a way. You could point an orthographic camera underneath a Rock object in the default scene (with flat terrain underneath) raise the rock so it's not in contact with the ground, and do a micro export of that. Make sure the camera is just above the flat terrain (and there is nothing "behind" the rock) and you have a rock object. Attached a simple example.
If you're talking about the fake stones shader - it's just that - a displacement shader and the rocks are obviously not discrete objects, but you can either micro export the patch of terrain that has the rocks you want, or as Dune mentioned make a vector displacement of the same area. The advantage of the vector displacement is that you can take it into a sculpting program like Mudbox and finesse the rocks by hand.
I do that with any "hero" fake stones that I use as you can fix some of the artifacts the fake stones shader sometimes produces. You can then export that back to TG as geometry or as vector displacement again - you just need to lower the formation a bit in the scene to hide the patch of ground that is attached to the fake stones.
The Photogrammetry idea is interesting, but I think it would be difficult to get right. Photogrammetry software looks for details in the image that it can lock onto and match to calculate a 3d mesh, and shading a terrain in TG might not give it enough unique detail to lock on to.
In any event, you can always make a micro export of anything that renders as a polygon in TG. That includes imported objects and even populations. I guess you might be wanting to capture texture detail as well (as photogrammetry can). If it's just terrain you are capturing you can get away with doing an ortho top-down render to get a color map and that works well in a lot of cases.
Or as an idea, you could set up a bunch of cameras around your section of terrain in TG and render color maps from that, then export the same cameras to a 3d app and do some camera projected textures to recreate your texture detail. I haven't done much texture projection, but I imagine that's possible - probably a lot of work though and there should be easier alternative solutions.