Terragen can render animated trees that are in an OBJ sequence format. No other animated formats are currently supported, unfortunately.
There is no actual 'wind system', but you can use various tricks and workarounds such as the Mesh Displacement feature driven by a Power Fractal or other procedural displacement function, or directly applying Displacement to individual parts of a model in its internal texturing network. The advantage of the Mesh Displacer is it creates correct shadows on the ground, but it affects the entire model (including the trunk of a tree, for example), whereas you can apply Displacement to separate parts of a model (as long as they were created with separate UVs), however the shadows will be incorrect and you will need to disable Ray Trace Objects (an improved rendering method) to have the displacement work. This is a current limitation that will be addressed in the future.
You can assign texture to existing materials. UVs must be defined in your modeling application beforehand in order to texture different parts of a model. Terragen does not have UV map editing capability, model parts are created automatically based on existing UVs when the model is loaded. Only OBJ and Terragen's own TGO format models (available from Xfrog for example) include texture information. OBJs *must* have an accompanying .MTL file with them in order to have textures loaded properly. MTL export is a function of the modeling program. For example Cinema 4D does *not* natively export MTL files with OBJs unfortunately, so it is not suitable for use in creating models for Terragen without an export plugin. Exporting of objects works but materials are not saved except in proprietary TGO format that only works in Terragen itself, so Terragen is not a good choice if you intend to make changes to a model to then use in another application.
Animating terrain is fairly easy, but it requires an animation version of Terragen (either Creative or Professional). Depending on what you want to animate, you could for example change the amount of displacement from an imported image, thus making the logo "grow" (bulge) out of the terrain. You would simply set a keyframe with 0 displacement at the beginning of your sequence (frame 1 for example), and set displacement to a larger level (judge it visually), for example 1000 meters, and add a keyframe for this at the end of your sequence (for example frame 100).
- Oshyan
