Terragen 3 non-commercial Skybox creation

[Eudaimonium]

Greetings,

First off, I am absolutely in love with Terragen software so far, the quality of the results one can achieve by simply toying around without any tutorials is astonishing.

Which makes the following all the more painful. I have grabbed the Clip file needed to generate 6 cameras, each of which will capture one side of my cube render, as provided by Planetside staff if I recall correctly. I've played around with my scene and achieved some desireable results.

However, when importing the rendered images into my 3D software (namely, Unity engine 5 in this case), I can see some sort of "brightness discrepancy" between the rendered images, as you can see in this screenshot:

[attach=1]

This happens very consistently in brighter scenes, though I've managed to render out a night-time scene (with a lot of clouds and moon illumination) without these problems, apparently at random :/

I have found this thread on these forums:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=20533.0

This person appears to have exact same problem as I do, and exact same version of software as I do, i.e. no GI Cache options that are mentioned as a solution. There have been no replies since, but I'm stuck with the same problem.

For what it's worth, my rendering settings (same for all 6 cameras) which produce nearly passable results are:
GI Cache quality, sample quality, blur radius, and prepass padding = 1
GI Surface detauls = OFF
Ray detail region padding = 1

How can I overcome this problem?


EDIT == Addition:

As per advice on the linked thread, I've tried re-rendering the entire set without GI, or that is to say, set all GI related options to zero.
While the seams/brightness problem is solved and the skybox is seamless, the problem remains that a significant amount of options within the program do not really have any effect, specifically "Enviro Light" objects, and about half of all directional light options do not make any difference on the final render, which does degrade the image "impact" and artistic quality, not to mention greatly limits the design possibilities.

[attach=2]
(This is more or less the exact scene as from the screenshot above. The difference is staggering.)

Is there any help on this matter?

[paq]

Hello,

The old way to create skybox image with terragen was to use an image stitching software like PTGUI.
The idea is to render the 6 view with overlapping zone  (so cam angle greater than 90*), and use PTGUI to mix the 6 images.
That will blend the brightness/illumination variation between the renders, caused by the GI approximation.

A good tutorial :

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,11608.0.html


Hopefully we can now use spherical or fisheye camera (my prefered solution) in T3, so this simplify the whole process.
(they are many solutions to switch to one projection type to an other).

Off course you probably need to upgrade your non commercial license to take advantage of higher resolution, as you will render your skybox in one single image.

(I really like the mood of your sky !)

[Oshyan]

You won't be able to effectively use GI for skyboxes without a licensed version and the additional features that provides. If you don't have budget for purchasing a license you'll need to find workarounds like using a Fill Light setup (look in the File Sharing area).

Please see here for a full list of limitations of the Free version of Terragen 3: http://planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-product-comparison

- Oshyan