Planetside Software has released the latest version of its landscape-generation software Terragen 4.3 with new animation controls to Terragen’s Easy Cloud system; adds new shading and rendering options, including early support for path tracing; and VDB export from Linux render nodes.
Terragen 4.3 Features are
Faster Rendering
Shaved about a third off calculation times for the colour generated by Power Fractal Shader V3 (colour/value, not displacement). This makes a big difference to render times for Easy Cloud, for example, and is expected to speed up many scenes that use the Power Fractal Shader.
Clouds
Animation of Easy Cloud. A new “Anim” tab on the Easy Cloud node has new features to animate the cloud textures:
-“Drift” simply moves the textures horizontally over time, with controls for speed and direction.
-“Evolution” has a few different options, but they all work by moving textures up or down on the Y axis which creates the impression of change over time.
-“Time warp”. When using any of the animation effects above (Drift or Evolution), normally these are calculated from the distance between the current frame and the reference frame, but this produces animation with a constant speed. “Time warp” allows you to vary the speed during the animation, pause or reverse time, create bounce effects, and so on. You do this by editing the animation curve on the “warped frame number” parameter.
VDB Export (Only on Linux)
Linux (Professional Edition) only: Cloud layers can be exported to VDB files from the command line.
Terragen 4.3 has new shading and rendering options, including early support for path tracing. It brings Terragen in line with most render engines like Arnold and V-Ray. However It's still WIP and not recommended to be used in production
Terrgen 4.3 also introduces a new deferred shading mode, intended to improve the anti-aliasing of textures and lighting effects like soft shadows on terrain and other displaced surfaces.
new Sample Rate render element, VDB export via Linux render nodes
Users of the Professional edition get a new Sample Rate render element, which visualises the number of samples generated by the adaptive sampler per pixel of the image, intended to help optimise settings.
Full list of new features and changes here!
Availability
New licences of Terragen 4 Professional cost $699; Terragen 4 Creative, which has a restricted set of features and caps maximum output resolution, costs $349. Terragen 4.3 is available for 64-bit Windows 7+ and Mac OS X 10.8+. The update is free to existing users.[post_ads_2]