Recent posts

#11
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by Matt - October 24, 2025, 07:44:21 PM
No offense taken, so don't worry about that. Thanks for the considerate reply.

I think we will be able to show a lot of these things coming together next year, and I hope that will allay some of your concerns. Terragen 5 will have all the power of the TG4 node-based interface (we are conscious of that being a familiar mode to many of you) as well as new modes of interaction.
#12
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by pokoy - October 24, 2025, 07:27:36 AM
Matt - please take my note with humor if possible, sorry if it sounded offensive. However, please note the underlying critique is targeted towards the fact that TG has seen only minor improvements, with requests for substantial features reaching far into the past, some being close to 10-15 years.

I guess everyone's priorities will vary, but to me TG Sky is just not something I'll ever find useful, especially since it doesn't offer anything over TG except for a different UI.
As for the UI, I don't see how TG Sky's UI will be suitable for all the functionality that TG provides (and needs to provide). While TG Sky is built around a render preview with only a few parameters exposed to the main UI, TG's main UI element is and will probably always need to be the node editor with lots of UI elements that would not fit visually into TG Sky right now - these two are entirely different paradigms and I personally struggle to see how TG in its full extents will translate to TG Sky.

That said, I trust in your vision, still, for those waiting to see substantial updates to TG the wait has been very long, while the switch to a subscription based model turned out to be costly without much return (again, everyone's priorities will vary). There were features brought to TG that I personally value very much, it's just that a new TG based on its UI is close to unimaginable to me. Maybe you have something to show so users can discuss and give you early feedback.

Please don't take this personally as it's my personal opinion only. Especially since I know a single developer can't move everything forward at once, it all takes its time.

Sorry for bringing this up and hijacking the thread.
#13
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.
#14
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
#15
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.
#16
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.
#17
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.
#18
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
#19
Terragen Discussion / Re: importing vdb?
Last post by midnight.mangler - October 22, 2025, 09:49:48 AM
Guys did this ever happen?
#20
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.