Micro-triangles?

[John-117]

Not to sound ignorant but what exactly is a "micro-triangle" in Terragen?  I am familiar with face/polygon/triangle counts form other programs is this Terragen's equivalent?  If so than why use non-standard terminology?  If not then what is it really?  Thanks in advance.

[nikita]

I think they are the triangles the image consists of. The lower the quality the bigger they are. So, they only really become visible when rendering in quality < 0.1 or in the 3D preview.

[John-117]

@nikita Thanks!  So if you are right and I understand you correctly micro-triangles are faces/polygons/triangles however as Terragen uses fractals for scene generation the number of triangles is variable based on the level of detail desired, hence the "micro".

Can anyone else confirm this?

[dandelO]

Yup, the higher the overall render detail - the more micro-triangles there are, the smaller, more sub-divided they are, that is.

[John-117]

@dandelO Thanks for the confirmation.

[old_blaggard]

Microtriangles (or micropolygons in general) are the meshes that result from a raster renderer's subdivision. In order to make things appear smooth (especially displacement), most rasterizers will subdivide a mesh into polygons that are smaller than an individual pixel of the image. In addition to Terragen, Pixar's Renderman and many other renderers use this terminology.

[John-117]

@old_blaggard  Thanks for the info.  I have more experience modeling and less actually rendering with higher end tools so I did not know the terminology was standard (searching with Google did not seem to help on this one either).