I've only been using terragen for a few weeks so forgive me if some of these things are possible and I've simply not found them, and some of these things have been mentioned already but I'll just add my +1...
and to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I'm a character TD for a studio in Toronto using Houdini, so I'd love to be able to integrate Terragen into some of our VFX projects -
1 - real cameras (focal, aperture etc etc)
2 - AOVs (rendering elements in separate passes), or even just a phantom shader...
3 - animated geometry (read file sequence 001.obj, 002.obj etc, you can hack this now with multiple terragen files but...
)
4 - export of terrain using a bounding box - create a BBOX, set scale, move to position, export as obj etc, this would allow for exporting of overhangs etc)
5 - import point cloud as population source, and possibly as seed points for clouds (this would add the awesomeness of importing animated points = particle system!)
***@Mr_Lamppost***
QuoteAn array population: i.e. I would like 20 rows separated by this distance each containing 100 instances of the object separated by that distance. It would still need to be possible to apply random scaling and rotation to the individual instances as with normal populations, local random position variation would also be useful as would stepped rotation.
Get Instance Variable: I'm not sure what to call this one but here's how it would work: Each instance within a population would have a random number between zero and one assigned to it which could be accessed via a Get Instance Variable node, this could then be passed to a conditional or blend shader. This would allow per instance colour variation and a whole host or related effects. This would also have the potential to control the object loaded at each instance which may be a more flexible way of implementing Unique Variations.
what you're describing are some of the features of Houdini's Copy SOP (
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini10.0/nodes/sop/copy ), even just a few of these features would be amazing to have in Terragen.
6 - bounding box view for clouds - based on density(?), so you'd have a rough idea of where your clouds are in 3D space
7 - optional lock camera to view
thanks