Recent posts

#11
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by Matt - October 23, 2025, 08:55:20 PM
@midnight.mangler Thank you for reporting this and not just forcing it through with higher render settings. There was a bug which only occurs when using the Path Tracer, and was reducing the scattering quality in clouds on pixels (or subpixels) where there was a surface behind the clouds.

Technical details: Clouds are not directly rendered by the path tracer, so we would not expect the clouds to look any different when using the path tracer. But path-traced surfaces are illuminated by the clouds (i.e. the surfaces scatter paths that may go into the clouds), and the path tracer adaptively adjusts a variable to speed up the cloud samples during this process. The bug was accidentally leaving this variable in the wrong state and it affecting the appearance of clouds that are visible directly to the camera, where it should not.

I think there will be an update to 4.8 very soon to fix this.
#12
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by Matt - October 23, 2025, 06:40:39 PM
Here's a mini roadmap in visual form:
TG5_roadmap_2025-10_dark.png

The above doesn't mark out VDB import, but maybe we might be able to include it somewhere like indicated below. To be decided...
TG5_roadmap_2025-10_dark_with-vdb-import-maybe.png
#13
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by Matt - October 23, 2025, 05:04:28 PM
There does seem to be a bug here. As Kevin said, switching to the standard renderer fixes the issue, but I am surprised by the excessive noise with these settings. I'll see if I can figure out the cause.
#14
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by Matt - October 23, 2025, 04:30:38 PM
Hi everyone,

@pokoy I noticed the sarcasm, and I understand the frustration. Our delivery pace for big new features is slow at the moment for a couple of reasons. It's mainly because we've made it our priority to work on a GPU/XPU volumetric render (VOLR) that goes beyond the current capabilities of Terragen, and that's a big project. I think most users have wanted GPU rendering in Terragen for a long time but there was never an ideal time to put other development on hold to make it happen. So we're just doing it. As you probably know, we're expecting to deliver VOLR as an alpha or beta early next year (probably Q1 for integration into Terragen Sky and later in 2026 for Terragen 4).

We're also building Terragen 5 with a new UI on top of our new codebase, TGV, which Terragen Sky is an example of. Step by step we're bringing TG4's features into TGV so that when Terragen 5 is released it's a full replacement of and a real improvement upon Terragen 4. All of this future-proofing development is making it harder to release exciting new features right now, but there are some R&D projects currently on the back-burner that we want to bring into Terragen 5.

VDB import is going to happen, but we'll start on that after VOLR is working well and we'll implement VDB rendering in VOLR. I think this will avoid some duplication of work that might occur if we were to support both the existing CPU renderer and the new one.
#15
Terragen Discussion / Re: Script to render out sever...
Last post by Kevin Kipper - October 22, 2025, 12:16:05 PM
I'm glad to hear you got it working!

Just to reiterate, the tg_cubemap_cameras.py script in the toolkit can be used to automatically set up the cubemap cameras in your Terragen project.  After you render the frames you can use the tg_cubemap_image_stitcher.py script to assemble the rendered images into any cubemap/skybox layout you wish.
#16
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by pokoy - October 22, 2025, 10:58:00 AM
It's only been 8 years, so not yet. You can now have multiple suns in TG Sky, and, honestly, that's quite a lot of features for my yearly sub. /s
#17
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by midnight.mangler - October 22, 2025, 09:49:48 AM
Guys did this ever happen?
#18
Terragen Discussion / Re: Script to render out sever...
Last post by hipshot - October 22, 2025, 03:33:42 AM
I forgot, here's the bat file and some info:

Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "n.bmp" -r -rendernode "n"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "e.bmp" -r -rendernode "e"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "w.bmp" -r -rendernode "w"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "s.bmp" -r -rendernode "s"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "up.bmp" -r -rendernode "u"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "dn.bmp" -r -rendernode "d"

Just paste this into a clean bat file and run, make sure you fill in the correct path. For some reason I couldn't do just the file w/o path, but this works as well.

In the scene, create 6 cameras, set each one of them to the correct rotation and make sure the coordinations and quality settings are exactly the same, these are the rotations you need:

N = 0 0 0
E = 0 90 0
W = 0 180 0
S = 0 270 0
UP = 90 0 0
DN = -90 0 0

Then make 6 render nodes, connect each one of them to the corresponding camera, make sure all render nodes have the same quality settings. BTW, cameras and render nodes can't have the same name for some reason, so just name the cameras to something else. In my case I named the cameras the full length name and the render nodes the short version.



Save. Quit. Run the bat file. It will run silently w/o opening the program, you can set it during sleep or whatever.

This is the result, stitched in photoshop. It's a sky for my quake 3 level. This is a shrunk down version, in reality, each image is 1024^2, so it will look very crisp and clear in game.
#19
Terragen Discussion / Re: Script to render out sever...
Last post by hipshot - October 21, 2025, 03:03:43 PM
Thanks for the reply Kevin. A lot of info, it's funny how I searched around google and whatnot and didn't find anything about this.

However, all this python and RPC stuff are too complicated for me. I was looking into the command line stuff, but didn't really find anything with cameras there (I feels all this could be a lot simpler haha)
I also have issues finding the discord, it seems all invites are dead. Are there a some what up to date invite I can use?


edit: Actually, I found out how to render and all from a batch file!
#20
Terragen Discussion / Re: Script to render out sever...
Last post by Kevin Kipper - October 21, 2025, 11:36:37 AM
Hi hipshot,

Great question.  First let me point out these two threads about the recent scripts we created for automating a cube map/sky box setup in Terragen and for stitching the rendered images together.

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,31269.0.html
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,31270.0.html

Also we made a blog post about it:
https://planetside.co.uk/blog/support-diaries-cubemaps/

I think the approach to render and save the six images automatically would involve the creation of a batch (.bat) file on a Windows system and then executing it.  The batch file would contain instructions from Terragen's command line rendering feature (see link below).  This would essentially launch Terragen, load the project, then render and save the frames.

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Command_Line_Reference

I believe Alex Pearce at Sim-plates recently shared some of his scripts for remote rendering on our Discord channel.  You may be able to look at his code and extract what would be needed to render the frames.  Here's a link to the video he shared: https://vimeo.com/1112145456/90b67220e2?share=copy