Quote...the bugs that need fixing are the situations where it causes problems...
Couldn't agree more with this line from Jo's post.
The auto-updating 'nodes' are the only areas that require attention here. Nodes that are very power intensive, like the heavy-duty heightfield operators and internal grass, especially when it has lots of geometry in the form of thousands upon thousands of blades.
The first thing I have to do, for instance, when using grass clumps is, delete a zero from both the number of blades and clump diameter. This reduces compute time considerably. I usually don't need a default, 10m patch of grass, with 10,000 blades, anyway. A 1m patch of 1000 blades makes much more sense to me, in general, for scene building.
Ultimately, I'd like not to have to do such optimizations before even begining to edit grass clumps or, unplugging HF operators from the scene before editing but, the one or two occaisions where it is necessary to perform workarounds is
far cleverer a problem to 'fix', than a complete UI overhaul of the way TG handles every single input. That's counter productive work, on a developmental level and a user level.
Terragen, or the people who make it available to we users,
never told anyone that it was trying to be like another application that might handle user-input differently. It works very well at the job it is designed to do, in its own strategy, which is to update everything in real time.
I find it the
most stable 3D application I own, with the most user friendly UI as well. Two/three years ago, the bugs were extremely counter productive, bad UI inputs would shut-down the entire program, deleting random items, likewise, multiple other bugs of an equally fatal manner. The small team have worked
hard and hard to iron-out these things and I've not, for a long long time, seen the dreaded 'Terragen 2 has stopped working' message. I can't say that for any other 3D app' I own.
I'll load a really complexed geometry tree model, for example, in Vue/Carrara/insert app', and if it doesn't kill the program, I'm waiting on the system to come back to life for a long, long time... Creation time.
Throw that same model at Terragen, however, and Terragen will eat it up, burp in your face and smile mockingly at you:
'Is THAT all you've got? C'mon!!! Ha! Don't make me laugh!' It works differently than other 'glossy' 3D packages out there, and it's best suited that way.
