Making unique variations of non-procedural models that *look good and fit together* would be *tremendously* difficult unless you had a library of base shapes that were *all explicitly designed to work together in any combination*. Even if you had such a library the requirement for these base shapes to work together in many combinations would place strong limits on flexibility and realism and/or the number of realistic variants. So even in the best case scenario for such an approach, it would take a lot of modeling time, increase the size of the Terragen application by 100s of MBs, and the end result would be mediocre if not downright bad-looking (at least compared to more advanced procedural and hand-modeled plants). A true procedurally-based plant system is by far the best way to achieve these goals. It's not a technology we have in-house at present, but there are many other high quality procedural plant modeling solutions and with the upcoming SDK availability hopefully one of them will choose to make a plugin for Terragen.
I looked at the "superformula" stuff and it really looks more applicable to something like plant seed shapes than terrain. The shapes are almost invariably symmetrical (something rarely seen in real-world terrain), and look more like diatoms than anything. I don't really see the value in using it for terrain, but a node that generated such shapes based on the root formula and variations of it *would* be interesting, if only because it would add another tool to the toolbox. That being said it is, again, probably a better fit for someone to write a plugin to implement it rather than doing so as a core addition. This is the kind of simple, clean, stand-alone generator formula that would be ideal for a plugin author to use as a first project, I think.
- Oshyan
