Future version wishlist...

[paulcurtis]

I haven't been using terragen that long. For context i come from a vfx/production basis and my normal tools are NukeX, Houdini, Modo etc,.

I think terragen is clearly capable of producing some lovely looking environment renders, which is the draw. However there are a few areas that i really think could really improve the experience. I'm sure as i use more i will find more but i believe Matt is very responsive so i hope this is a little helpful

1) When rendering a test image i notice that any changes to the underlying document are often reflected in the rendering and quite often will result in a crash. It would be nice to 'export' the current render job and render a copy or block the UI working when a render is in progress. I can't count the number of times i've tweaked something and it crashes.

2) In populations being able to randomly choose from a group of objects would be super useful, or having a way for populations to not clash with each other. I am finding the single object a bit restrictive.

3) Animation curves, for the love of all things sane, please have a look at using bezier curves like everything else! 

4) GPU rendering could be a game changer. I'm looking at man months of rendering at the moment which is just going to cost a lot - to the point where taking stuff out and rendering elsewhere might make sense. But that's a huge undertaking when the built in renderer works pretty well

5) Being able to save out animations from the preview window would be really very useful.

6) I am still wrapping my head around object shading. So i think this is more me that terragen. For example i have a population of fir trees but really in order for it to look anywhere near right, i do have to really add a lot of translucency to the needles. I am not sure what light interaction is going on but the level i'm adding feels wrong. As i said this is perhaps more me right now

I'm sure there are more, and i'm sure everyone has theirs as well. I don't know if there's an official list somewhere?

Kindest
Paul

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your comments and observations. 

My primary reason for replying is to let everyone know that the Planetside staff is very much aware of these issues.  That's not to say that we don't want to hear them, rather that we encourage you to continue to use the forum to ask for feature requests and improvements to the software.

I'll try to address a few of your points below.

1)  While it is possible to change settings during a render, it's definitely not recommended.  Others on this forum have mentioned that you can temporarily halt the render by clicking the PAUSE button at the top of the render view window, make a change, then click the PAUSED button to resume the render.  Alternatively, assuming that your computer system has the memory and cpu resources, you can run multiple instances of Terragen, thereby letting you save a scene and render it on one instance of Terragen while continuing to work in Terragen on another instance.  Likewise, if you have render farm access you could save your scene and submit it to the render farm, and continue to work in Terragen your workstation. 

2) We've been discussing how to implement multiple objects within Populations.

3) Animation curves...noted as we've discussed on previous threads.

4) We understand the GPU issue, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "...taking stuff out and rendering elsewhere might make sense"?  Do you mean submitting projects to online render farms such as PixelPlow, or removing assets like cloud layers from a project to reduce render times?

5) Saving preview images and animation ... on the list.

6) On the off chance you haven't seed the wiki doc regarding translucency here's a link: https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Translucency


While you might not always get a response for a particular feature or suggestion, we do take everyone's input and suggestions seriously. 

Be assured that we're working "behind the scenes" right now on some really exciting features for Terragen.

[WAS]

4) We understand the GPU issue, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "...taking stuff out and rendering elsewhere might make sense"?  Do you mean submitting projects to online render farms such as PixelPlow, or removing assets like cloud layers from a project to reduce render times?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think he is referring to moving assets to another DCC and rendering with it. Like your terrain to Blender/Max or something.

[paulcurtis]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the reply - the support here is exceptionally good for which i am very grateful.

Yes, for the comment about taking elsewhere i mean doing exports of the terrain into fbx, into houdini/nuke and doing volumetric work there in order to use VRay GPU rendering (which i've done tonnes of volume stuff with) or the new Houdini renderer. I can get 2K renders in 10 mins on a couple of GPUs verses a few hours on CPU. 

I did see about VDB export from terragen but realised that was linux only? So i would love to see that as an option on the windows version too.

Or just doing spherical layers and comp in Nuke.

But the scene i'm working on is quite fiddly with the clouds and i will most like push that to a render farm to keep it in terragen.

Thanks for that link, going through that now

Kindest
Paul

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for clarifying your point, and providing an example of your workflow.  It's always good to know how people are utilizing Terragen in their production environments.

Currently VDB export from Terragen is only available on the Linux version, but porting that over to the other versions is high on our list of to dos.

[WAS]

Currently VDB export from Terragen is only available on the Linux version, but porting that over to the other versions is high on our list of to dos.

That being said, it's really not too difficult to install windows Linux subsystem, and install Ubuntu from the Microsoft store. There you can quickly install the prerequisites and use the Terragen node to export to your HDD and use in whatever application.  No need for a server or dedicated Linux machine.

Here is a tutorial: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,26130.msg278415.html#msg278415

PS This is not emulation, so you will not be suffering any performance impact. Benchmark is in the same variance of timings as the windows app.

[Jeremy]

4) GPU rendering could be a game changer. I'm looking at man months of rendering at the moment which is just going to cost a lot - to the point where taking stuff out and rendering elsewhere might make sense. But that's a huge undertaking when the built in renderer works pretty well

I totally agree. GPU render for clouds\atmpshere will be extremely useful. As i see, Terragen probably the best software for producing clouds. But render animated clouds, for example 1 minute, on CPU taking a very long time. Or at least ability export all clouds animation to vdb sequence, and then render it with redshift in other DCC.