Planetside Software Terragen Professional 4.1.18 x64

Terragen is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. Create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets and use Terragen to create the most realistic visualisations possible. You control the weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons and stars. With Terragen you have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micropolygon displacements, clouds and object distributions. You can reorganise the planetary shading pipeline to suit your goals. Place grass and trees wherever you want, as well as other objects in native TGO or OBJ format that you have modeled in third party software.

Atmosphere & Clouds
Terragen 4 features the most realistic atmosphere model available in a commercial application today. We simulate not only the more common Rayleigh and Mie scattering properties, but also the effects of ozone (new in Terragen 4). Terragen implements a complete spherical planetary atmosphere, with accurate lighting and volumetric cloud and fog layers which can be controlled by custom shader networks, all rendered with multiple scattering and global illumination.

Achieve beautifully realistic sunsets in seconds by simply adjusting the sun angle, with a real-world atmosphere model taking care of the rest. When you’re working with a fully simulated global environment, objects and effects interact like you’d expect them to, so sophisticated effects like “god-rays” or even solar eclipses are remarkably easy to achieve. You can also easily add stars, backgrounds, or even whole planets to your skies.

If you need more control, Terragen’s flexible node system allows you to create virtually any type of cloud, from wispy stratus and cirrus, to billowing cumulus and towering thunderheads, or even fog and mist. Real, or imaginary, you can create it in Terragen. And all of this can be visualized in real-time with the new Ray Traced Preview (RTP) for instant feedback.

Lighting
With realistic sunlight(s), local, and spot light sources that can illuminate anything, ray traced soft shadows, global illumination that enables full lighting interaction between surfaces, atmospheres and clouds, and ambient occlusion options, Terragen gives you all the flexibility you need to light your scenes. The quality of global illumination or ambient occlusion can be adjusted to find the right trade-off between render times and lighting quality. Our goal is to give you the right balance of lighting as quickly as possible, and then give you controls to tweak individual lighting contributions to perfect your art.

HDR environments rendered by Terragen 4 can be used as image-based light sources and reflection environments in other renderers. Terragen’s HDR sun and skylight system is both inspired by nature and sensitive to the needs of visual effects in practice. The sun is as bright as the sun – much better than in HDR photography – and you can control its size without affecting its total contribution to the scene in order to get the best quality results in the destination renderer.

“Terragen has been giving me incredible skies and environments for many years now,” says Rob Nederhorst, VFX Supervisor at Radium / ReelFX Creative Studios. “The team has taken an exponential leap in terms of photographic reality. I have done several projects with Terragen where it has generated lighting and reflection HDRIs and those became the only light source in the 3D renders.”

Rob Nederhorst has used Terragen on commercial projects at Digital Domain, Sway Studio and Speedshape/LA, including the Djarum Mezzo cigarette spots “Race” and “Leap” which were nominated for a Visual Effects Society VES Award for outstanding compositing. You can see a visual effects breakdown video here.

Terrain
Terragen allows you to create and manipulate highly realistic terrains, both heightfield and procedural. You can load existing heightfields to replicate real-world terrains and gain additional control by using a 3rd party terrain editor, or leverage the powerful built-in procedural functions to achieve global-scale terrains of nearly infinite detail, from the smallest pebble, to the largest mountains. You can combine the benefits of both terrain types in one scene, seamlessly. Even your heightfield terrains can be enhanced with the power and flexibility of procedurals.

Using 3D procedural functions, go beyond the limits of heightfields to create truly realistic terrains, including sheer cliffs and even overhangs. Let your imagination run wild and create out-of-this-world terrains.

Georeferencing
Georeferencing of digital elevation data is a snap. This works automatically with a variety of raster GIS data, including most DEM and aerial imagery formats available from the USGS. Lat-long values can be entered manually if automatic georeferencing is unavailable or needs to be adjusted. Fractal details can be added automatically to imported elevation data.

Objects
Rendering of complex, fully textured objects is easy with Terragen. Add life to your scenes with models of houses, trees, custom-designed rocks, or any other object. Objects can have an unlimited number of polygons and textures, constrained only by available memory. With your objects loaded into your scene, you can then apply any of Terragen 4’s surfacing effects and procedural shaders to enhance the look of your texturing.

With a fully realized and powerful instancing system you can take your use of objects to a whole new level, and achieve highly realistic results. With Terragen 4’s “Populators”, you can add thousands or even millions of trees, rocks, birds, blades of grass, or any other object to your scene. You can instance any object that you can load and anchor those instances to the planet or to any other single object (think moss on a log, for example). Population variation controls allow you to add per-instance adjustments to position, scale, rotation, color, and lean, or even delete specific object instances, allowing you to create more unique-looking ecosystems and get the exact results you’re looking for. Terragen 4’s population system makes it possible to render literally billions, even trillions of polygons in a single scene!

Animation
All versions of Terragen 4 include powerful animation features. Almost every parameter in a Terragen project can be animated over time, not just the camera. This can be used to render dramatic fly-throughs, time-lapse effects and much more. You can animate everything from sun, clouds, and atmosphere, to object movement, to terrain displacement, and beyond.
You can key-frame parameters, import key frame values from text files and render image sequences from the user interface or frame by frame from a command line. Camera paths are plotted. You can preview fly-throughs in real-time in the 3D Preview.
With the powerful animation features of Terragen 4, you can bring your scenes to life.
The Animation module includes a complete timeline and key frame editor, allowing you to see a visual representation of all animated parameters. A curve editor is also included where you can directly adjust key frame values on a plotted motion curve.

Camera
Terragen implements an intuitive and realistic camera system based on physical camera attributes, including Focal Length and Aperture. Simple but powerful controls are available for motion blur as well as depth of field, allowing you to create consistent effects that integrate well with real footage or other renderer output. You can have as many cameras as needed in your scenes and easily switch between them. You can even use cameras to drive other effects such as texture “front projection” or geometry area of export.

Alternate camera modes allow you to render in orthographic or spherical modes, or with a fisheye perspective, often useful for dome rendering scenarios and other special use cases. With native stereo camera support, Terragen 4 also is equally capable in VR production and stereo film work. Stereo options are included for every camera and allow you to easily move to a stereo workflow without changing other aspects of your setup.
Import and export camera data in FBX, Nuke CHAN, or maya MOV formats for easy interoperability and integration with your existing tools and workflow.

Import & Export
Many applications now support Terragen’s native heightfield format, .TER, so transferring terrains between Terragen 4 and your other applications is never a problem. Terragen can also export heightfield data to .EXR and import it from a wide range of image formats.
Procedural terrains can be exported in two ways: as a view-dependent triangle mesh in LWO, OBJ, or FBX format or by converting to a raster heightfield which is easily saved as .TER or .EXR.

View-dependent triangle meshes allow you to choose exactly where you want to transfer geometry to your other applications and how much detail you want.

Camera motion can be imported from FBX as well as Nuke .chan files and Maya .mov files. Additional third party tools are available that allow you to transfer camera motion to Terragen 4 from Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Blender and others.
At the heart of Terragen 4 is an advanced hybrid micropolygon and ray tracing renderer. It is capable of rendering surfaces with extreme procedural displacement and produces images and animations with production quality anti-aliasing, motion blur, and Depth of Field. A hybrid Depth of Field rendering mode can provide low noise results in significantly less time. Procedural or image-based shaders can build complex surfaces from simple objects, relying on the renderer’s adaptive subdivision algorithms to dynamically adjust to extreme stretching and creasing.

Shaders
Terragen 4 uses a sophisticated shader system to enable complex texturing and surface manipulation. A multitude of built-in shaders are available to build compelling, realistic surfaces, or you can go to town with custom function networks that can control colour textures, displacement shaders, masking functions, object distributions and more. The pre-defined shaders cover a wide variety of effects, including specular, reflectivity, and transparency, enabling highly realistic water effects. Shaders can also affect the displacement of surfaces, adding detail and realism to the terrain.

Shaders can be used to mask other shaders, and multiple shaders can be blended together in an infinite variety of ways to recreate the diversity of the natural world. While Terragen 4’s strength is in procedural functions, you can also load external image maps to apply to any part of your scene, mixing them seamlessly with your procedural textures. Shaders can also be applied to objects, so you can leverage the power of Terragen 4’s procedural functions to add realism and detail to your imported objects.

Scale
Your scenes in Terragen are built around a full planet model, allowing you to create whole worlds of realistic, detailed terrain. We haven’t neglected the other end of the spectrum though; Terragen 4 is equally adept at depicting small-scale details, with displacement down to the centimeter level, and a detailed lighting model allowing realistic rendering of close-in scenes.
With both large and small-scale detail possible in the same scene, you can go from orbit to ground level seamlessly and easily. Forget clumsy or obvious cuts and other cheats, Terragen 4 gives you all the freedom you need to realize your vision.

Workflow
Terragen 4 includes a ray traced real-time preview with progressive refinement. The ray-traced preview mode supports Terragen shaders, lighting, and atmospherics, including clouds with volumetric shadows (aka “god rays”). The videos below features several of the capabilities of the new preview and each clip is shown in real-time. You can also use the Render Crop with the preview to do “region-of-interest” previews for even faster response. This is all just a glimpse of what you can do with the new ray traced preview method.