While i appreciate the new information, If i have to speak my mind ill say this technology preview release is just bad PR, i use the old terragen for texture making in the battlefield 2 series (with a little help from photoshop) and had great hopes for terragen 2 to improve in this department but also to make skydomes that would be signifigantly better than in old TG, but since the render times are so long and many of the atmosphere features undocumented i find it incredibly incredibly frustrating to work with. For ground textures the minimum resolution is 1024x1024 but more common is 4096x4096 in bigger bf2 levels, also skydomes are 1024x1024 5 render pictures. Later converted to a hemisphere in HDRshop. I think i have made one skybox that i was satisfied with in more than half a year. With render times of 3 days for an entire skydome (that looked good in preview but crap in final version). Also other issues like GI cant be used in skydomes, top down view button missing for quick texture rendering.
With times of learning and render speed like this the TG2 preview is for my production completely useless! I had great hopes for the beta and was confident that now i could finaly write a tutorial about skybox making in this program, unfortunately it didnt happen. Also the team im working on was in desperate need of new skydomes so it ended with me buying a new DVD with skybox textures (360 degree pictures made by specialized photographers) that cost more than the double of the TG2 preview
This also is because terragen 0.9 cant compete in this department for newer games anymore. So baiscly i have ditched terragen2 and gone back to the old terragen for texture making and skyboxes now sadly comes from another source. Planetside really should have waited to release this until it was beta since the current release is making people angry. At one time I was so angry after trying for several weeks just learning the basic functions that i considered giving my license away.
This may sound very harsh but I think Planetside should get feedback from all sorts of users, maybe my expectations very to high (since the old terragen was so good) and maybe people who work with terragen 2 for other purposes than mine get more out of it.