some informations before buying

[Antoine]

Hello,

I currently use Modo 501 and I need a good landscape renderer.
I have hesitated between Terragen and Vue but I think Terragen is much more realistic.
I have used a free version of Terragen 12 years ago or more, it was already impressive.

But my question before buying is : is it possible to export a terrain along with the textures from Terragen to Modo (version 501)?
When a tree is duplicated, is it duplicated randomly (no trees will be the same) or are they just a mere copy ?

Thank you in advance,

[Oshyan]

You can export the terrain, but direct texture export is not currently supported. You can do basic texture export with a top-down orthographic camera render, but the results would not likely be as good for texture mapping as a direct export function would be. Generally we suggest using TG as the renderer for all terrain elements since this is one of its greatest strengths, with terrain export used for scene matching, object placement and shadow casting, etc. In that case texture export should be less important, but of course your workflow may require it.

Trees and other objects are instanced with position, size, and rotation variation, but no changes to the actual object are made. There is no native vegetation system aside from some very basic primitives (a simple grass object for example). To add variations you would use multiple populations of different objects. There are also techniques discussed here on the forums for varying color, leaf, and potentially even geometry position/shape procedurally. Here are some examples:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12191.0
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10810.0

- Oshyan