[This is a new post with corrections to the file downloads]
If your version of Terragen has a spherical camera option (Terragen 3 Professional, Terragen 3 Professional with Animation), you don't need this setup to submit to the Terragen VR Challenge. Simply enable "spherical" in the camera node and render one image.
If you have a version of Terragen 2 or Terragen 3 that can't render with a spherical camera, then use this cube camera setup.
This is a set of 6 cameras to render a 360-degree environment in cube format. Each camera has a 90-degree horizontal field of view and represents one face of an imaginary cube surrounding the viewer. The cameras are named:
Cube Face Forward
Cube Face Back
Cube Face Left
Cube Face Right
Cube Face Up
Cube Face Down
Instructions for use:(This is a lot easier than it looks, I'm just describing all the steps as clearly as I can.)
1) Download the clip file named "Terragen2_VR_cube_face_cameras.tgc" for Terragen 2 or "Terragen3_VR_cube_face_cameras.tgc" for Terragen 3.
2) In Terragen, go to File -> Insert Clip File, find the file you downloaded and open it.
3) If Terragen asks you whether to automatically insert the clip file, choose "Add Clip".
After a second or two, in the Node Network View you should see new node group containing 6 camera nodes. If you like to work in the Node Network, move this group somewhere close to your render node or other cameras nodes in your network.
If you click on the "Cameras" layout button at the top of the UI, 6 new cameras should also appear in Cameras list at the top left of the UI.
4) The cube faces cameras have the correct rotation and field-of-view settings to render a 360-degree view of your scene, but they don't know the POSITION of your viewpoint.
Copy and paste the position coordinates of your original camera into the positions of each of the cube face cameras. You can do this with the clipboard button next to the camera's position parameter.
5)
Change your render settings to render a square image. In your render node, set the image width and image height to equal values. For the Terragen VR Challenge, you can submit renders at 500 x 500 pixels or more.
6) Assign one of the cube face cameras to the Camera input. Now you're ready to render an image! To render a complete 360-degree view you will need to render 6 images like this.
Or, just watch the video https://youtu.be/JQt_FD_Ps28Note about multiple cameras:If you use the 3D Preview to view different cameras, take care not to use the navigation tools or navigation inputs when you're looking through camera that is not the current render camera. If you move the view, any changes will affect the camera directly, even without pressing the "Copy this view to current camera" button.
I prefer to do most of my scene building with a normal perspective camera, then connect the render node to the 360-degree cameras only when I'm ready to render the full 360. That way I don't accidentally change the cameras.
Matt