Terragen 2 User Guide Progress?

[PabloMack]

Hi All,

Am I correct that the official Terragen 2 User Guide is planned as a multi-part project over an extended period of time?  Only Part 1 is posted on the Planetside website and I believe that this document was only released recently (and consists of only 26 pages).  May I ask what to expect in the way of its general organization and comprehensiveness of the final product (say version 1) and what the timeline is for its completion?  From what I can surmise, the software's documentation is very incomplete and much of its functionality must be determined with sometimes little more than the names and labels on the menus and tabs.  Where is this "User Interface Reference" that the last paragraph in the User Guide Part 1 talks about?  Is it the Wiki written by others, the content in the Help Menu of the executable or something else?  It is not in the docs folder of the software installation directory structure.  

[Oshyan]

Hi Pablo, you're correct in that the documentation is planned in multiple parts. Part 1 covers the general UI and basic workflow. Part 2 will go into more depth in each "Layout" (Terrain, Shaders, Objects, etc.). It will cover more specific workflow for each area, and some specific common techniques.

What it will *not* do, though we know a lot of people want it, is cover a lot of specific techniques for making particular types of features, e.g. canyons, etc. Some of these techniques may be demonstrated more generally, with how-to info, but it is not intended as a general reference for "how do I make this with TG2?" questions. To attempt that would really be a massive undertaking, not only because there are so many different natural features to emulate (not to mention all the unnatural ones that can be attempted ), but also because in many cases there are several *different* ways to do things. We hope that our community wiki will continue to grow as a resource for specific tutorials, tips, and techniques.

Our goal with the official documentation is to give people the knowledge of how the tools function and interconnect so that they can hopefully determine how they can accomplish their scene construction goals. We feel that's the best use of our time from a writing standpoint.

We realize too that there will be some people that simply won't take to that method of scene construction and for whom the documentation will seem "incomplete". The simple fact is that no application can be all things for all people. TG2 requires a different way of working than some other tools, akin to the difference between working in World Machine and Geocontrol. Some people find one method intuitive, other people prefer a different way. But there is really no way to make the node network intuitive if it is fundamentally different from someone's preferred method of working. But we hope that the documentation will those who do appreciate the UI approach the tools they need to create their scenes effectively.

As for the Node Reference, there is a very incomplete version linked to from the docs page on our site. We've recently discovered that in fact an older version is all that is available there now, an error on our part. We're working on a completely new revision that will contain more complete information (though not yet comprehensive), but perhaps more importantly will enable us and the community as a whole to help make sure it stays relevant and up-to-date collaboratively. More on that soon.

As for a release date for the docs, as with everything, I'm afraid I can't give you a date. It's surely small comfort, but I can say at least that part 2 will come this year some time.

- Oshyan

[PabloMack]

Thank you Oshyan for the reply.  I like what I am hearing.  People are very different in the ways they go about their work.  The guy who got me started in CGI is a professional visual artist who has told me that he absolutely hated physics.  As for me, I absolutely loved physics and I got the top grades in my classes.  You will do well in physics if you understand the principles and gain the intuition to know when and how to apply them.  If you do that, you can do anything that is doable.  

Artists tend to memorize masses amounts of raw data with minimal understanding and have some sort of parallel brain search to find something that is familiar and similar to what they want to "create".  This is actually part of all of us.  But science-oriented people want to master a much smaller set of prinicples and figure out for themselves how to apply them to do something they've never done before.  This is why artists generally only write good documentation for artists and science people generally only write good documentation for science people.  I don't like to think about the money I've wasted on voluminous written works that are filled with screen shots and just walk you through how to operate the controls.  That tells me next to nothing (and is unworthy of taking up book shelf space).  Unfortunately, the tekies who really understand the software are generally too busy writing the next version to bother with documentation, so the job of writing documentation is often passed to people who don't have much of a clue and the users who really want to know how it works end up suffering.  

But "birds of a feather usually flock together" so, perhaps, highly touchy-feely people (who are the usual bunch that create un-natural works just because "that looks really cool") will tend to collect in the Vue and Carrara user bases and TG will attract the people who really want to understand what is going on and (mostly) produce photo-realistic images.  This fits well with the XFrog philosophy of going "botanically corrrect".  That philosophy is what sold me on the Megabundle.  So, hopefully, the forthcoming documentation will deliver quality explanations of what is really going on "under the hood" to accurately portray nature.  The rest should be left up to us; the user base.  If this is the way it ends up going, then I will have found the virtual nature home where I truely belong!  

[Oshyan]

Hopefully our work won't disappoint then. Note that what is going on "under the hood" has a lot more to do with math in most cases than actual natural phenomena. It bears visual resemblance, but the rules that govern scene creation are more mathematical than physical. I know that potential disconnect is a challenge for many people. Hopefully we can chip away at that division and make something everyone can understand and gain from.

- Oshyan