quality tab:
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detail: constant that determines overall detail of entire scene. Renders of .5-.7ish usually are good for prefinal renders, and .8-1 are good for final very nice renders.
anti aliasing: controls how much aa will be used (see extra tab). this usually is most useful in scenes with lots of vegetation/grass, etc that go off into the distance. More about aa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasingGI relative detail: increases the number of dots you see before the render, GI stands for global illumination, which basically is how realistic of lighting it will calculate. A value of 2-3 is usually considered good for final renders too. Increasing it can increase render time quite a bit.
GI sample quality: like above, controls the GI settings, only it increases accuracy of the sample. As above a value of 2-3 is usually sufficient.
GI blur radius: blurs the GI a little, not sure 100% on how it functions, i generally leave alone.
super sample prepass: "This takes more image samples in the prepass without increasing the total number of GI light samples. This provides a better coverage of GI on small parts or edges of objects and clouds, with a smaller increase in render times than a similar increase in GI relative detail."
GI surface detail: increases details of terrain surfaces and such, off by default as it increases render time quite a bit, but some scenes it makes a good difference. suggestion is to crop a small section and render to see what it looks like with it on and if you benefit from it.
More about supersample vs GI surface detail:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4502.msg47253#msg47253-----------------------
crop region tab
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pretty self explanatory i think
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extra tab
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pixel filter - this is the type of aa filter being used. each type has advantages/disadvantages. examples of the various filters in action:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5142.msg53401#msg53401 (it continues onto the next page)
bloom - creates a bloom effect with the aa, see above examples of difference of bloom on/off.
detail blender, displacement filter - dont know sorry, never touched them.
microvertex jittering - has to do with surface details and such, i keep it on, and it should usually be on to prevent some stuff happening sometimes. has to do with very close detail to terrain i think.
detail jittering - same as above? dont know.
do reverse primary rays - dont know... sorry.
do ray traced shadows - does what it says, ray traces shadows for the scene.
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effects tab:
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soft clip stuff - dont know.
contrast - adjust contrast for the render without using Photoshop after or such.
gamma correction - adjusts the gamma correction etc.
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advanced tab
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minimum threads - sets the minimum threads to use while rendering.
maximum threads - sets the maximum threads to use while rendering.
with both above its for multi core systems and such that can run more then one thread rendering. these settings are there to kick terragen into seeing some peoples multi core systems. by default terragen SHOULD detect and use the right amount. as some users need to set these to different numbers from the default (1 min 16 max) for tg to see their cores, or they want to manually limit how many cores get used (like i sometimes maximum threads 3 on my quad core so that one core remains free for other things to be done on computer in addition to rendering)
subdive cache - how much each sub division of the render gets in memory.
preallocate subdiv cache - this sets the memory up before using it with the render. this sometimes is a setting used to help determine if memory is causing a render crash and such i believe.
ray detail region - see topic:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6006.0basically its useful during cropped renders, and padding is useful doing multiple renders that are later stitched together, or for animations. fixes lighting issues basically.
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sequence/output tab
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output filename - filename to output
extra output image - allows to output additional types like alpha maps.
micro exporter - used for LWO exportation of the scene.
the rest of the settings are related to animation, basically saying what frame to start with, which to end at, and step of 1 renders all frames between the two, 2 renders every other frame, etc etc.
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basically theres all i know about the various settings... some people might have more clear or better explanations on some stuff. i have no clue on some settings that i've never touched.
hope it helps. i did a search and couldn't really find a overall tutorial on all the settings. however, if you ever have a question about certain features, do a search of that specific feature and you will usually get a convo about it and what it does.
