If I consider the type of stuff I make, the quality I'm after and the volume I produce then faster rendertimes are nice, of course, but not that super-important to me anymore.
I don't mind rendering hours or over a day for a full HD still.
I want photographic results and it's especially that niche Terragen tries to fill in, creating large scale photographic CG landscapes.
Which it does pretty well by the way, except for some situations. I find that most of the rendering time is consumed by vegetation and water...
Therefore I'd really really like to see a bi-directional path tracer or any kind of 'modern' raytracer instead of the current relatively quite inferior raytracer.
(Multiple) Importance Sampling in combination with path tracing / advanced ray tracing is what every commercial renderer uses and/or aims for these days. See the last "Current state of rendering" at FXGuide:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-state-of-rendering/Terragen has to follow this trend, or I should perhaps better say I hope they will follow this trend at some point to keep the visual quality competitive or up to par with the output of most other renderers used in the industry. Well, that could be a possible motivation for Planetside.
For me it's the possibility to render more photographic looking vegetation and possibly allowing for more advanced shading effects, like SSS or more photographic looking water. TG's water lacks that glossy wet look, to me it looks like reflective wrinkled metal foil.
Perhaps an improved raytracer or path tracer would also allow for real(istic) refractions and volume effects in the water.
Also GI/ray detail is quite low in TG. Render a dense forest from distanec with GI 8/8/4 with plenty atmo samples and AA16 full, then open EXR in Photoshop and the shadows are pitch black = no GI + still quite noisy vegetation despite the vast number of AA samples.
Modern renderers use these much more wisely/effective and efficiently.
(a partial solution is rendering at at least quadruple size)
Anyway, that's quite a long story for a single, but not the least by far, wish of a modernised ray tracer and GI solution.
Quote from: mhaze on January 13, 2014, 06:16:33 AM
My most wanted feature is a square and a crystalline noise.
One or two more noisetypes would be useful, although you can do quite a few things already, but a more square-like noise could be handy for rocky stuff.
Crystalline noise? Sounds a bit like a voronoi-like noise? Do you have an example?
Square noise is also a voronoi noise, but then with Manhattan distance function.
There's plenty of (pseudo)code available on the net, so shouldn't be too much of a challenge technically.
It's a matter of priorities as well of course.
Surface-wise and if it were for me to say then I'd like to see something more directly controllable, almost sculptable and with volumetric surfaces allowing for arches and what not.
Like with these wishlisht topics the wishes are kind of endless and so is the variety of the wishes, so definitely not the easiest topics for Planetside to filter through!
Cheers,
Martin
