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Software Description:
Terragen is a powerful solution for renderingand animating realistic natural environments. Create entire worldsfrom your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets anduse 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 theshader networks used for terrains, textures, micropolygondisplacements, clouds and object distributions. You can reorganisethe planetary shading pipeline to suit your goals. Place grass andtrees wherever you want, as well as other objects in native TGO orOBJ format that you have modeled in third party software.
Atmosphere & Clouds
Terragen 4 features the most realistic atmosphere model availablein a commercial application today. We simulate not only the morecommon Rayleigh and Mie scattering properties, but also the effectsof ozone (new in Terragen 4). Terragen implements a completespherical planetary atmosphere, with accurate lighting andvolumetric cloud and fog layers which can be controlled by customshader networks, all rendered with multiple scattering and globalillumination.
Achieve beautifully realistic sunsets in seconds by simplyadjusting the sun angle, with a real-world atmosphere model takingcare of the rest. When you’re working with a fully simulated globalenvironment, objects and effects interact like you’d expect themto, so sophisticated effects like “god-rays” or even solar eclipsesare 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 allowsyou to create virtually any type of cloud, from wispy stratus andcirrus, to billowing cumulus and towering thunderheads, or even fogand mist. Real, or imaginary, you can create it in Terragen. Andall of this can be visualized in real-time with the new Ray TracedPreview (RTP) for instant feedback.
Lighting
With realistic sunlight(s), local, and spot light sources that canilluminate anything, ray traced soft shadows, global illuminationthat enables full lighting interaction between surfaces,atmospheres and clouds, and ambient occlusion options, Terragengives you all the flexibility you need to light your scenes. Thequality of global illumination or ambient occlusion can be adjustedto find the right trade-off between render times and lightingquality. Our goal is to give you the right balance of lighting asquickly as possible, and then give you controls to tweak individuallighting contributions to perfect your art.
HDR environments rendered by Terragen 4 can be used as image-basedlight sources and reflection environments in other renderers.Terragen’s HDR sun and skylight system is both inspired by natureand sensitive to the needs of visual effects in practice. The sunis as bright as the sun – much better than in HDR photography – andyou can control its size without affecting its total contributionto the scene in order to get the best quality results in thedestination renderer.
“Terragen has been giving me incredible skies and environments formany years now,” says Rob Nederhorst, VFX Supervisor at Radium /ReelFX Creative Studios. “The team has taken an exponential leap interms of photographic reality. I have done several projects withTerragen where it has generated lighting and reflection HDRIs andthose became the only light source in the 3D renders.”
Rob Nederhorst has used Terragen on commercial projects at DigitalDomain, Sway Studio and Speedshape/LA, including the Djarum Mezzocigarette spots “Race” and “Leap” which were nominated for a VisualEffects Society VES Award for outstanding compositing. You can seea visual effects breakdown video here.
Terrain
Terragen allows you to create and manipulate highly realisticterrains, both heightfield and procedural. You can load existingheightfields to replicate real-world terrains and gain additionalcontrol by using a 3rd party terrain editor, or leverage thepowerful built-in procedural functions to achieve global-scaleterrains of nearly infinite detail, from the smallest pebble, tothe largest mountains. You can combine the benefits of both terraintypes in one scene, seamlessly. Even your heightfield terrains canbe enhanced with the power and flexibility of procedurals.
Using 3D procedural functions, go beyond the limits of heightfieldsto create truly realistic terrains, including sheer cliffs and evenoverhangs. Let your imagination run wild and createout-of-this-world terrains.
Georeferencing
Georeferencing of digital elevation data is a snap. This worksautomatically with a variety of raster GIS data, including most DEMand aerial imagery formats available from the USGS. Lat-long valuescan be entered manually if automatic georeferencing is unavailableor needs to be adjusted. Fractal details can be added automaticallyto 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 anunlimited number of polygons and textures, constrained only byavailable memory. With your objects loaded into your scene, you canthen apply any of Terragen 4’s surfacing effects and proceduralshaders to enhance the look of your texturing.
With a fully realized and powerful instancing system you can takeyour use of objects to a whole new level, and achieve highlyrealistic results. With Terragen 4’s “Populators”, you can addthousands or even millions of trees, rocks, birds, blades of grass,or any other object to your scene. You can instance any object thatyou can load and anchor those instances to the planet or to anyother single object (think moss on a log, for example). Populationvariation controls allow you to add per-instance adjustments toposition, scale, rotation, color, and lean, or even delete specificobject instances, allowing you to create more unique-lookingecosystems and get the exact results you’re looking for. Terragen4’s population system makes it possible to render literallybillions, 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 overtime, not just the camera. This can be used to render dramaticfly-throughs, time-lapse effects and much more. You can animateeverything from sun, clouds, and atmosphere, to object movement, toterrain displacement, and beyond.
You can key-frame parameters, import key frame values from textfiles and render image sequences from the user interface or frameby frame from a command line. Camera paths are plotted. You canpreview fly-throughs in real-time in the 3D Preview.
With the powerful animation features of Terragen 4, you can bringyour scenes to life.
The Animation module includes a complete timeline and key frameeditor, allowing you to see a visual representation of all animatedparameters. A curve editor is also included where you can directlyadjust key frame values on a plotted motion curve.
Camera
Terragen implements an intuitive and realistic camera system basedon physical camera attributes, including Focal Length and Aperture.Simple but powerful controls are available for motion blur as wellas depth of field, allowing you to create consistent effects thatintegrate well with real footage or other renderer output. You canhave as many cameras as needed in your scenes and easily switchbetween them. You can even use cameras to drive other effects suchas texture “front projection” or geometry area of export.
Alternate camera modes allow you to render in orthographic orspherical modes, or with a fisheye perspective, often useful fordome rendering scenarios and other special use cases. With nativestereo camera support, Terragen 4 also is equally capable inVR production and stereo film work. Stereo options are included forevery camera and allow you to easily move to a stereo workflowwithout changing other aspects of your setup.
Import and export camera data in FBX, Nuke CHAN, or maya MOVformats for easy interoperability and integration with yourexisting tools and workflow.
Import & Export
Many applications now support Terragen’s native heightfield format,.TER, so transferring terrains between Terragen 4 and your otherapplications is never a problem. Terragen can also exportheightfield data to .EXR and import it from a wide range of imageformats.
Procedural terrains can be exported in two ways: as aview-dependent triangle mesh in LWO, OBJ, or FBX format or byconverting to a raster heightfield which is easily saved as .TER or.EXR.
View-dependent triangle meshes allow you to choose exactly whereyou want to transfer geometry to your other applications and howmuch detail you want.
Camera motion can be imported from FBX as well as Nuke .chan filesand Maya .mov files. Additional third party tools are availablethat 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 andray tracing renderer. It is capable of rendering surfaces withextreme procedural displacement and produces images and animationswith production quality anti-aliasing, motion blur, and Depth ofField. A hybrid Depth of Field rendering mode can provide low noiseresults in significantly less time. Procedural or image-basedshaders can build complex surfaces from simple objects, relying onthe renderer’s adaptive subdivision algorithms to dynamicallyadjust to extreme stretching and creasing.
Shaders
Terragen 4 uses a sophisticated shader system to enable complextexturing and surface manipulation. A multitude of built-in shadersare available to build compelling, realistic surfaces, or you cango to town with custom function networks that can control colourtextures, displacement shaders, masking functions, objectdistributions and more. The pre-defined shaders cover a widevariety of effects, including specular, reflectivity, andtransparency, enabling highly realistic water effects. Shaders canalso affect the displacement of surfaces, adding detail and realismto the terrain.
Shaders can be used to mask other shaders, and multiple shaders canbe blended together in an infinite variety of ways to recreate thediversity of the natural world. While Terragen 4’s strength is inprocedural functions, you can also load external image maps toapply to any part of your scene, mixing them seamlessly with yourprocedural textures. Shaders can also be applied to objects, so youcan leverage the power of Terragen 4’s procedural functions to addrealism 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; Terragen4 is equally adept at depicting small-scale details, withdisplacement down to the centimeter level, and a detailed lightingmodel 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. Forgetclumsy or obvious cuts and other cheats, Terragen 4 gives you allthe freedom you need to realize your vision.
Workflow
Terragen 4 includes a ray traced real-time preview with progressiverefinement. The ray-traced preview mode supports Terragen shaders,lighting, and atmospherics, including clouds with volumetricshadows (aka “god rays”). The videos below features several of thecapabilities of the new preview and each clip is shown inreal-time. You can also use the Render Crop with the preview to do“region-of-interest” previews for even faster response. This is alljust a glimpse of what you can do with the new ray traced previewmethod.
Installer Size: 19.8 MB
Download Links : Planetside Terragen Professional v4.0.04 x64 + Crack