Terragen question

[zhar2]

Hi, im looking to use terragen to create high-res textures for planets, i normally use stock imagery of earth but its very limiting and i hate when some one says "oh that looks like a bit of canada" or similar.

SO i want to create textures (rectangular proyection W=2H) that can be used on an sphere that are unique and arent related to earth, but i havent found a way to import custom heighfield to edit on terragen (erosion and sorts) or how to make it into a mappable texture for a sphere, is this possible in terragen?

[neuspadrin]

I know you can do erosion on imported heightmaps, you just:

Add Terrain --> Heightfield load file
Then, select it and below.
Add Operator --> (choose one, erode is on there)

As for your other questions not sure i understand fully.

[Goms]

basically it is possible to somehow get a heightfield around the sphere, but its not that easy.
You should use a power fractal for this, its not that hard with functions etc and has more details.

[zhar2]

Oh the second part is that terragen seems to generate the terrain in a flat plain and the edges of the map fall to match the flat plain, i need to use it in an sphere not a flat plain so it can be generated into textures and export them to use them in a 3ds max proyect (in an sphere) so this "world" would be continuos from east to west without a seam where the eges of the texture are.

[Goms]

so you want to use a heightfield based planet made in tg2 in 3ds? i don't think this is possible....
A heightfield is always a flat plain, because its something like a picture.

[Henry Blewer]

 This can be done, but you'll need to use really large scales for the landmasses. I would suggest using the power fractal terrain shaders. The oceans can be created using the water shader, and putting it to the correct height to make continents.
The render camera would need to be at a high altitude. Turn off the atmosphere for the render.
The water shader should separate the landmasses. That way the image will wrap onto a sphere easier.
Side note: Sometimes the tube mapping works better for mapping images onto spheres. At least it does using Blender.

Good rendering!