[SFX]

Well it was years arriving and finally we get to play with it !!

First thoughts ? Well don't forget this is a "Technology Preview" so expect some major improvements..soon ?

Well all the various names for the new Tg confuse me so lets start off by just calling it TG2 for now

It is slow..yes sorry but it is. This is more down to the fact that GI is now available and the AA settings have supposidly improved. You can switch off GI and lower the AA to try to get speeds back as they were

The GI is like the UI very confusing and seems to be found all over the place, i am sure that the GI on or off is the "Global" on off switch so best mess around with this. It also gives the option to use AO instead of GI, I have yet to test that

The basic concepts for the textures is pretty much the same..just a lot more confusing as there apperar to be a seperate "shaders" option, but if you follow the pdf tut and just approach texturing as you did before then the concepts of the layers are pretty similar

Same goes for the atmosphere and lighting

Terrian creation has a new look and feel, you can either create a single height map as before or you can "terrain " your whole planet in one go. It seems that by default TG2 creates a globe/planet and you choose wheter to terrain the whole planet or just a subsection ( as before)

The terrians seem to be far more detailed than in TG1

I have not yet looked at water but the clouds are a big "NEW" with 3d volumetric clouds as well as the old 2.5D. I cannot yet get the hang of overall lighting to get them to look good and sadly i gave up on a render of mountains in clouds which though it was looking good was taking too long
So my first example render is really not much different thean what you could have got with TG1

Well sorry this really is not a review as i really don't know too much about TG2 as of yet !!

It seems you can save terrians, they export as a LWS scene ( which C4D opens OK) the terrian is split into a mutitide of LWO object files

I have not tried it yet but you can import models ( LWO ?), create rocks and clumps of grass and instance these. as well as importing a tree model and instancing that

My main issue at the moment is speed, TG2 is sucking no less than 250 MB RAM on render which does go up. My 1.6 ghz AMD just about handles it. the program works on W2K and XP, not sure about MACS and Linux

So anyway here is my first render..1 hour render time

 mountains1.jpg (129.63K)
Number of downloads: 627

But more interesting for C4D users the new export method. TG2 like TG can export to LWS format with the terrain split up into LWO's. previously i never had much joy with this format but now the TG2 terrains are so much more detailed

here is a base render i did in C4D with no mats and just a ininite light with hard shadows

the terrain detail in excellent..

 c4d.jpg (85.14K)
Number of downloads: 380

[kalab]

Well so far I'm really enjoying this, despite the slow render times. Turning GI off and reducing AA and quality speeds it up quite a bit for test renders. The PDF overview actually seems to be fairly thorough as far as getting used to the interface.

What I'm missing so far is the top view landscape View/Sculpt window to "Paint" the terrain. Also it would be nice to have a top view overview to show camera, sun, objects, terrain, etc. and to be able to grab objects and position them. That would seem pretty intuitive to me.

I'll post some renders after I've dug in a little more.

[Dark Crypto]

Nice renders!

[SFX]

yes i think the lack of top view, showing camera and more importantly sun position is an issue

I like the vol clouds for scenes like clouds in mountains but i have not yet worked out how to get the cloud self shadows as you would with pyrocluster. my clouds look to uniform

[SFX]

Images looking a bit washed out ?

try setting your gamma to 1 in the render settings

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/ip...p?showtopic=835

[SFX]

Here is a link to an early TG2 animation

http://www.kk3d.de/t...n/tg2/index.htm

[SFX]

Here is my first water render, apparently you can color the water by adding a color function to the water node in the node editor, you can also link a heightfield generator to the water !!

Transparency is not available yet

My clouds really lack definition i will work on that

So the result is not much different from the old TG but then i have much much more to learn

 water2.jpg (84.75K)
Number of downloads: 317

[kalab]

Man, what a nice animation. It says 2005 on it. Wonder what those render times were like.

Some observations (note:these are all cons, but there are many Pros that I'm enjoying as well).

-Heightfield generators don't load when I reopen a scene. It's there, just not calculated. I always come back to a flat, smooth default world. Procedurals like Power Fractals reload just fine.

-I miss being able to sculpt a terrain like in in TG 0.9.

-Sure would like an Undo! (enough said)

--"Generator make river" has some weird calculation issues... Every digit of input forces a calculation, even before I finish inputing data in the input field. Then, it just keeps calculating over and over and over. If I abort, abort, abort my river is there, but I'm not sure it's complete.

There are more but I can't remember them right now.

[kalab]

"Assign Shader" function is a guaranteed instant crash. At least the one in the Heightfield Generator Shader tab.

[SFX]

makes me wonder what those Alpha testers were doing with it all these years !!

Fun though it is to play with i wil stick with .9x for animations, if i need vol flythru clouds i can always use pyrocluster

[SFX]

Here is an "above clouds" render, took about 1.5 hours

 mtclouds.jpg (72.09K)
Number of downloads: 293

Thing is is is not much better than what i could do with the old terragen and pyrocluster in Cinema 4D at a tenth of the time ( or less)

Also we cannot yet animate in TG2 and even if we could 1 hour + renders per frame !! I think not

You know though TG2 may be a great step forward if render times cannot be lowered it will be useless for animations, looking at Carrara 5.1..it does make gorgeous terrians and you can do volumetric cloud fly throughs

[djackson]

SFX, on Dec 18 2006, 09:01 AM, said:

Here is an "above clouds" render, took about 1.5 hours

attachment

Thing is is is not much better than what i could do with the old terragen and pyrocluster in Cinema 4D at a tenth of the time ( or less)

Also we cannot yet animate in TG2 and even if we could 1 hour + renders per frame !! I think not

You know though TG2 may be a great step forward if render times cannot be lowered it will be useless for animations, looking at Carrara 5.1..it does make gorgeous terrians and you can do volumetric cloud fly throughs

These are some impressive renders. I had been using Terragen 1 for quite a while. I have to get used to the node based program of T2.

One thing I'm trying to figure out. When I export it as a lightwave file and bring it into C4D, I notice that the heightfield map is still pixelated. Is this because I'm using the demo? is it locked at a low resolution?

I've attached a snapshot of what it looks like in my C4D. You can see more of the pixelization at the lower left.

~DJackson

 terrain.jpg (206.99K)
Number of downloads: 85

[SFX]

it could be the phong shading, play with your phong tag settings and it may clear up

[djackson]

SFX, on Jun 22 2007, 07:21 AM, said:

it could be the phong shading, play with your phong tag settings and it may clear up

Will do, I'll check that out. Too bad these renders take forever. :(/>

[Dark Crypto]

Imma get it, im also thinking of gettin bryce again, i had bryce 5 for a while, dunno where that is, i also might try vue