Hey guys,
I'm a 3D artist, who's pretty new to terragen. I found out about the program, since I want to make realistic looking planets. I've started using the free version of terragen for now but want to upgrade to the professional version at some point, since I want to render out high res HDRI's for "normal" 3D programs.
I've started experimenting with creating procedural Planet textures, directly in Terragen and must say, I'm pretty impressed with the realism you can get from it. The problem is, that I also want to use the Planet textures outside of Terragen in other programs. I think I've read somewhere, that this is not possible, right? But then I saw, that you somehow can export hight map data, so maybe there is a way to get the texture out of terragen?
Also, if anyone knows some good resources on how to achieve realistic looking planets, I would love to check them out. It is a lot of trial and error and lots of reading documentation. The only two video resources that are somewhat helpful are the tutorials from terratuts (which don't go into that much detail) and the tutorial series from Planetside Software, even though they don't talk about orbital shots.
It is mostly trial and error, even for me at years of trying lol.
Here is my planetary spherical map exporter for textures, and subsequently can feed heightmap by attaching displacement to scalars colour adjust in to the surface layer 02's luminosity input instead of the textures.
It is very slow. Also an example of a basic planet. Basically the idea is to invert the displacement and planet and then capture a spherical map from the centre of the planet.
Thank you very much, I will check that out