As I just got into Terragen again, upgrading to version 3 in the process, I thought I'd revisit some old files and do more work on them. One of my files has given me a bit of trouble, though. In the render tab, the preview goes black, and any render I try to do also turns out completely black. In the other tabs it looks fine to me.
I have looked over the settings, but can't see any plausible reason for this behaviour. Perhaps someone with a bit more experience than me might be able to figure out what is wrong with the settings? Any assistance would be highly appreciated.
Cut the "Water shader 02 (mud flat)" node and put it before the Planet node (in the last place of the chain).
Unchecking the "Limit minimum altitude" does it too but you don't want that probably as it changes the appearance.
Haven't tried but maybe changing the parameters here could help too.
The water node is sometimes problematic.
Don't know if there are other factors like different version problem-changes etc.
Thanks. It doesn't look quite like before, but at least that's a good starting point for working further with it.
Actually, it seems to work fine as long as it isn't the first one in the shader chain after base colours.
Nice :)
Anyway, what I was doing in the old file, which probably isn't a good idea processor-wise, was to make everything covered by the water shader and then effectively hide the water shader by using other surface shaders on top of it. It was my third Terragen project file, after all, so I was still learning the most basic of basics.
It is of course better to mask the water shader instead, which probably will reduce my rendering times significantly too, so that's what I am doing in my new version, adding the water shader as a child to a surface shader, and masking it with a painted shader. It makes so much more sense, doesn't cause the render to go black, and it's faster.