This was one of the greatest parts of terragen .9. You could go in and easily, visually define your terrain. Shaders will always be invaluable, but sculpting helped to give a more natural feel to your scene.
You have the new paint shader now, this can be pretty much used identically to the heightfield sculpt tool from TG 0.xx.
You'd paint your general shape and plug it into a displacement shader's 'function' input. (Between these two you'd need some sort of small scale fractal shader to add detail to the rounded brush-stroke terrain.) The displacement shader would then go to 'compute terrain'.
Or, If you wanted to export the painted terrain; You'd have to plug the displacement shader into a heightfield generate's 'shader' input(you could use the fractal detail option instead of a power fractal shader for detail here) and then the heightfield can be saved as .ter by right clicking the heightfield generate node.
:)
EDIT: Remember to hit 'generate now' to make the terrain visible. The higher the detail - the longer the generate time but... Here's a little trick I discovered that I like to call 'The Wiggle Method' ;) When you hit 'generate now', mouse over the little progress window rapidly back and forth with your cursor to accelerate the building process. :)
It would also be nice if we had some terrain texture presets (ice, various rock types, etc), in addition to the shaders.
Do we know when the final version will be here and are there plans to make the interface easier? Right now, it handles a bit much like a programming tool. It cold be more artist friendly imo.
The overall interface will remain the same. We do hope to improve the accessibility of the UI in the future, though TG2 will always be an inherently more complex and demanding application than TG 0.9.
- Oshyan