Terragen 4.9 Frontier Builds are here!
Use the Check for Updates feature in the application to get links to the latest 4.9 builds if you have a license of Terragen 4 Professional or Creative with a current subscription or maintenance expiring no earlier than the 15th of December 2025.
MDD Reader Improvements
The MDD Reader in object reader nodes (e.g. OBJ Reader and TGO Reader) can use the options on the Sequence tab, including Loop, Ping Pong and Frame Offset. It can also work with MDD files larger than 2Gb.
Object Space Texturing and Shading
The renderer now supports Object Space shading and texturing. This allows you to go beyond UVs but still shade independently of the object's location, scale or rotation, unlike World Space texturing. Object Space works on instanced/populated objects as well as non-instanced objects, and can be used on any kind of object, including Planets, so it's easier to create effects like polar ice caps, or you can enhance the shaders of your imported objects in all sorts of ways.
You can achieve this with new features that have been added to Transform Input Shader and Transform Merge Shader and with the brand new Get Point node.
The new Get Point node gives you coordinates of the point being sampled, either in texture space, object space or world space, with some sub-variants in each case. Get Point can be used as a general replacement for Get Position in Texture, Get Position in Geometry, and Get Position, but the additional options give you access to information that was not available before.
Instance/Object Data for Texturing and Shading
Transform Input Shader and Transform Merge Shader have new options that allow you to apply textures in instance/object position space, in addition to the new object space options mentioned above. One possible use for the "Instance/object position" mode is to map textures to populations while keeping the sampled colour constant within each instance.
The new Get Object Vector node gives you information about the object or instance being shaded or displaced. It can return a 3D vector containing the object's position (including an option for the anchor point if the object is an instance), size (either the size of the bounding box or the scale factor of an instance), and rotation information via direction vectors. One possible use for this node is to apply random variations to every instance in a population by feeding the instance position through a Perlin 3D node.
Direction Limits in Surface Layer
Surface Layer and Distribution Shader V4 have a new tab "Direction limits'. The altitude constraint and slope constraint tabs have been renamed to "Altitude limits" and "Slope limits". Direction limits can be use to simulate snow accumulating more on surfaces that face in a particular direction, or moss that grows on one side of a tree, etc.
Faster Heightfield Shader and Fractal Warp Shader
Heightfield Shader's built-in fractal warp feature has some optimisations which allow it to calculate faster, which can improve render times in scenes using heightfields.
Fractal Warp Shader has some optimisations which allow it to calculate nearly twice as fast, which can improve render times in some scenes.
New Command Line Options
"-camera" tells the renderer which camera to use. See the command line documentation for details.
"-noloadobjects" tells Terragen not to load any objects automatically. This can be used when you want to load a project more quickly and don't need the objects to be loaded during the session.
Bug Fixes and Other Improvements
See the full change log, attached, for details.
Use the Check for Updates feature in the application to get links to the latest 4.9 builds if you have a license of Terragen 4 Professional or Creative with a current subscription or maintenance expiring no earlier than the 15th of December 2025.
