Recent posts

#41
Image Sharing / Re: All these worlds...
Last post by Dune - October 21, 2025, 01:53:01 AM
Terrific. Sky is great!
#42
Image Sharing / Re: All these worlds...
Last post by raymoh - October 21, 2025, 01:19:23 AM
Another view of the planet Zavijava IV, my hypothetical fourth planet of the star Beta Virginis.
This polar region extends around the North Pole of this young world, the South Pole being a sea, without landmass.
The northern landmass of the supercontinent is cold and snowy, but there is little ice. The climate of the polar regions is warmer than on Earth, the weather often foggy and stormy.
At the horizon, the two moons of this planet can be seen. They are of different size, but due to their orbits they appear optically almost the same size and can occasionally "eclipse" each other, similar to the Moon sometimes covering the Sun during a solar eclipse.
#43
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by Kevin Kipper - October 20, 2025, 02:02:09 PM
Thanks for sharing the project file.  The source of the noise is in the indirect lighting.  By adding a Render Layer I was able to save out the direct and indirect lighting elements and easily see the noise pattern.

You'll need to increase the Anti-aliasing value to clean up the noise.  This will increase the render time, but you can also reduce Easy Cloud 01's Ray-marching quality from 0.832301 to the default value of 0.5 to help compensate for that.

Since you're using the Path Tracer to render, you might try to increase the Max paths per sample value.  This can help reduce render times because the "smoother" sampled result means the anti-aliasing doesn't have to work as hard to clean up noise. (but test it first).

Lastly, if you don't need the Path Tracer for other reasons in your project, you could try rendering via the Standard renderer.  The standard render time was 03:52 verses the path tracer 23:50 with an anti-aliasing value of 8 for both renders.

31338_PathTracer_Render_23m50s.jpg
Path tracer render

31338_Standard_Render_03m52s.jpg
Standard render



#44
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by midnight.mangler - October 18, 2025, 06:04:18 AM
Here is an actual render. Top of image is flawless, then starts to get very noisy.

test.png
#45
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by midnight.mangler - October 18, 2025, 04:11:01 AM
testfile.tgd

Thanks! :-)
#46
Terragen Support / Re: Cloud rendering switches f...
Last post by Kevin Kipper - October 16, 2025, 11:25:08 AM
Can you send us the project file so we can take a look at it?  
#47
Terragen Support / Cloud rendering switches from ...
Last post by midnight.mangler - October 16, 2025, 02:10:39 AM
Hello All

I have a curious issue. When I render clouds, the top of the render is perfect, but the bottom is very noisy. This can start from the upper middle part of the image or with the same clouds, but different perspective or including obj) it can be at the very bottom of the image. I can't figure out why it changes (or why its there at all). I wish I could attach an image as an example but for an unknown reason the upload reaches half way and stalls. I tried several times. So I'm hoping someone has hit this issue before and understands what I might be talking about.

Running build 4.8.23 on an Apple Silicon Mac. Did not yet have a chance to see if the same issue occurs on Windows but will try tonight.

Btw its odd you can't upload a tif without converting to another format as that is the default save to disk image format for Terragen.

Love my Terragen but baffled by this issue. Appreciate any help.
#48
Announcements / Re: Terragen Sky, build 2025-1...
Last post by Matt - October 14, 2025, 05:03:08 AM
Quote===================
Build 2025-10-14.01
===================

Fixed the anti-aliasing of the Sun Direction Dial when in "Look Up" mode.

4-suns_2025-10-14.jpg
#49
Announcements / Terragen Sky, build 2025-10-13
Last post by Matt - October 14, 2025, 01:35:23 AM
Terragen Sky - Build 2025-10-13.01

Use "Check for Updates" on the splash screen to download the latest Terragen Sky.

  • Multiple sunlights
  • Sunlights have four new parameters which affect sunlights in the same way they do in Terragen 4
  • The Sun Direction Dial has a new look, shows more information, and has some new options
  • "Anti-aliasing bloom" option in the Render panel
  • Left and right docks are resizable, with optional symmetry between left and right docks
  • Various other improvements

See the full change log below.

468px-TGSky_20251009_01_SunDirection.png 468px-TGSky_20251009_05_SunDirection_MulitSuns.png
800px-TGSky_20251012_05_SkyViewportToolsSunPos.jpg
800px-TGSky_20251009_04_UI_Symetry_Off.jpg

Quote===================
Build 2025-10-13.01
===================

=== Sunlights (Lighting Panel) ===

Multiple sunlights:
 - Add sunlights with the "+" button at the top of the Lighting Panel.
 - To delete a sunlight, click on one of the items in the list of sunlights to give it focus, then press Delete or Del.
 - You can undo the creation and deletion of sunlights.
 - The ability to delete sunlights is disabled when the list item loses focus. Also, deletion is not allowed if there is only one sunlight.
 - When you click on items in the sunlight list, the app automatically closes the Canvas Edit Window ("edit mode" is ended) and deselects any Sky Paint strokes that might be selected in the current Sky Paint canvas. This is to try to avoid confusion about what items are deleted by the Delete/Del key.
 - The "Sun Position" viewport tool affects whichever sunlight was most recently selected in the list of sunlights, and the tool button shows the name of that sunlight.

Sunlights have four new parameters which affect sunlights in the same way they do in Terragen 4:
 - Colour. The individual R, G and B components can be edited by clicking in their rollers and typing, or by sliding the rollers left or right with the mouse. We will add a proper colour picker in a future version.
 - Strength.
 - Diameter (apparent angular diameter in degrees). This combines soft shadow diameter and visible disc diameter into a single parameter.
 - Soft shadows (checkbox).

The Sun Direction Dial has a new look, showing:
 - The colour of each sunlight (including approximate colour attenuation by the atmosphere that depends on its elevation)
 - Actual sun diameters, which are indicated by the size of the circle representing each sun
 - The camera frame and viewport rectangle, which are represented as lighter-shaded areas with black outlines

The Sun Direction Dial has new options which can be toggled on or off:
 - Flip the dial as if we're looking up at the sky
 - Make it automatically rotate to the camera orientation

The Sun Direction Dial draws more quickly as colours are cached and updated only when something changes.

Fixed a bug that would sometimes occur when loading a new project and finding that the Lighting Panel showed camera parameters.
   
=== Rendering ===

"Anti-aliasing bloom" option in the Render panel. This is like the same feature in Terragen 4's render node. This produces a nicer edge on the sun disc in the rendered image, but note that it currently increases render times.

The automatic sizing of render buckets uses some new math that depends on the image resolution, number of threads, and whether anti-aliasing bloom is enabled.

=== Miscellaneous UI ===

Left and right docks are resizable, with optional symmetry between left and right docks. Dock symmetry can be toggled by holding Shift while dragging a dock resizer bar.

Changes were made to the widths of the menus in the main menu.

Changes were made to the text that is shown in the Edit menu for undo and redo of some paint stroke actions.

"Inertia on " has been removed from the names of undo actions involving inertia so they are automatically batched with the original user actions that caused them.

Main Window is woken up on startup without having to move the mouse over the window.

Main Window doesn't have to be woken up for the network license check to work, and when the license is obtained the Main Window is woken up so the result is displayed almost immediately after.

Bug fix: Menu panels were preventing subsequent drag interactions with other widgets from working properly because the menu and its ancestors were still stealing the mouse after it was closed.

Chrome Ball in the viewport will not go much smaller than 16x16 when resized with the mouse scroll wheel (i.e. if the size is < 16 it will not be shrunk any further).

Save Preset Button, Export Clip Button and Export Scene Button are disabled while a render is in progress, and they have tooltips(*) explaining why they're disabled (not yet a true tooltip; currently only displayed in status bar).

Changes were made to how Sky Paint stroke selection works, to allow more intuitive deletion of sunlights (although it shouldn't really change the overall behaviour much if we've done it right).

=== Technical ===

Work-in-progress changes to the export of sunlights to a Terragen 4 project file: the template sunlight is disabled and renamed "DELETE ME", and the actual sunlight nodes are added to the exported project.

When loading a project or sky preset, Haze Layer 1 is created automatically if there are no layers with the word 'haze' in their names, rather than if there are less than 4 cloud layers. The new layer is disabled if loading from a .tgsky preset file or a buffer embedded in a .tgv project file, whereas previously this only happened if loading from a .tgsky preset file.

Project files and .tgsky preset files have a "compatibility_era" parameter which defaults to 0 but is saved with the value 1 from now on. When loading files with compatibility_era == 0 (saved before 2025-09-30.02), any sunlights with a strength of 1.0 will have their strength set to 5.0. This is because many old presets were saved with the incorrect value of 1.0 which was ignored when loaded into previous versions.

Use "Check for Updates" on the splash screen to download the latest Terragen Sky.
#50
Planets / Re: Distant Ringed Planet in S...
Last post by Dune - October 09, 2025, 01:16:33 AM
Yes, of course. Stars do require quite some detail, and if further away, well...