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.
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.
@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?
Yup, the higher the overall render detail - the more micro-triangles there are, the smaller, more sub-divided they are, that is.
@dandelO Thanks for the confirmation.
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.
@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).