Build 2.3.20.1 (release candidate) Bugs fixed: 170, 245, 263, 268, 278, 280, 287, 288, 299, 300, 301, 305 Mac only: The Mac version has now been designated a final quality release and is out of public beta. 64 bit builds available for Windows and Mac. Mac only: The Mac version starts in 64 bit mode by default if your Mac supports 64 bit and is running OS X 10.5 or newer. All Intel Macs except first generation Intel machines with Core Duo or Core Solo processors suppport 64 bit. If your Mac is a PowerPC then it will support 64 bit if you have a G5. In 64-bit versions, the default size of the subdiv cache is chosen according to the number of processor cores detected or the user overriden number of cores. The slider's minimum and maximum values are also modified accordingly. If you are using a custom default project you might not see this change. RENDERING Rendering with a larger number of threads is now much faster (up to twice as fast) on the Mac and also improved to a lesser degree on Windows. This improvement applies to both 32 bit and 64 bit. Some aspects of the ray tracer which were previously limited to distances of 1e8 (one hundred thousand kilometres) are now theoretically limited to 1e16 (10 billion kilometres). The "render subdiv settings" node (which is currently a hidden node) has a new parameter "ray detail multiplier", which allows you to control the detail of surfaces underwater, shadow-casting detail etc. Prevented a crash that could occur with a large amount of GI prepass padding. OBJECT IMPORT/EXPORT New node: Micro Exporter, to replace the LWO Micro Exporter. The Micro Exporter can output OBJ, LWO and TGO. Normals and/or texture coordinates provided by the shaders can be written to OBJ or TGO files. Micro Exporter and LWO Micro Handler receive geometry prior to the final stage of back-face culling and culling of invisible micro-triangles. This removes the main cause of holes and missing triangles in exported geometry, but some small gaps may remain due to other render settings. Fixed a potentially large memory leak in LWO Micro Exporter. Object reader nodes (OBJ Reader, LWO Reader, TGO Reader) can be exported as OBJ, LWO and TGO (previously only TGO). The File menu now has an "Import Objects" item which allows you to import LWO, OBJ and TGO files either individually or as populations. SHADERS AND OBJECTS The Transform Shader can now apply rotation. It uses the same rotation convention as objects and cameras. The Transform Shader has an option to "use world space (final position)". This assigns the texture coordinates from the current world space position (losing UVWs) before applying any transformations. Planets have a rotation parameter which rotates the geometry (but does not automatically rotate the textures). This is necessary to avoid aliasing in animations where the planet's surface shaders are rotating. If a population uses an object generator's Unique Variations feature (e.g. the Rock object), there was a bug that prevented changes to the object from being seen by the populator. This has been fixed. However, you still need to force a repopulation in order to get the changes. Fixed a bug in the Simple Shape Shader where rotation wasn't applied to displacement in ellipse mode. The Heightfield load node no longer posts an error when you create it without choosing a file. The Heightfield load node now displays the size in metres and height range of the loaded heightfield. LWO reader now prompts you to choose a file when its created. It also no longer posts an error when you create it without choosing a file. Object readers support sequences using %04d (for example) in the filename. ATMOSPHERE AND CLOUDS Corrected some quantization in the sun glow in atmospheres and cloud layers that could occur with high values for "glow power". These problems didn't occur when the glow power was within the normal slider range, however. In the GUI only, the parameter "enable ray traced shadows" in the Planet Atmosphere and Cloud Layer V2 has been renamed to "Receive shadows from surfaces". Its function has not changed. 3D PREVIEW AND TIMELINE The 3D Preview in the main window now remembers its object display mode when it's closed and reopened. Windows only: Fixed a crashing bug when closing the 3D Preview in the main window using its close button. The 3D Preview compass has changed. You can now choose between a compass which shows 0 degrees heading (which is what the old North-South compass was confusingly doing) and a set of 3D XYZ axes. You can switch between compass modes with shift-C. There is a preference to choose the default compass style in the Navigation prefs panel. There is a new object node called Landmark. This can be used to place landmarks/points-of-interest in the 3D Preview. The Landmark objects only render in 3D Previews, not actual renders. The 3D Preview reset camera button and context menu now have "Snap to" items. These let you snap the camera position to the origin of object/shader positions. This should be useful with Landmarks. Cloud Layer V2, Simple Shape Shader, Shader Array and Landmark nodes no longer draw their previews when disabled. 3D Previews in secondary windows are now updated when you scrub the animation timeline. Animation playback should be improved slightly. Timeline and playback controls are no longer shown in non-animation versions of TG2. Timeline and playback controls can be shown and hidden in TG2 Deep with Animation. NODE NETWORK A Note node is available to write notes in the network view. You might use these to document your work, provide useful reminders or draw attention to parts of your project. Notes are created from the "Create Other" submenu of the Network View's context menu. "Select All" now works in the network view. The bookmarks menu, accessible when the network view bookmarks are scrollable, now only shows global bookmarks and groups at the current level. Network view bookmarks now sort correctly as you change group names. Improved network view zoom behaviour when the view is fitting to contents. Double clicking on a internal network icon (little "+" ) in the network view now takes you to the internal network. NEW COLOUR PICKER AND NODE PALETTE There is a new colour picker. You can still use the OS colour picker by clicking the Palette icon in the TG2 colour picker. Windows only: Fixed a problem with modal dialogs bringing an odd window forward when closed. This was apparent with the colour picker. There is a new Node Palette window available from the View menu. It lets you browse the nodes by category or choosing favourites. You can create nodes by double clicking in the list or dragging and dropping from the list to a network view. You can open multiple node palette windows. Node palette windows are saved and restored across sessions by default. This can be controlled with a preference in the General prefs panel. UNDO Improved behaviour when undoing Add and Remove animation key operations. Node param Undos now have a timeout. Previously a new param Undo would not be added until you changed another param or performed a different action. A new param Undo is now added if you haven't modified the same param for a short time. A save point is added to the Undos when you save a project. You will get a warning if you try to undo past the last point where you saved the project. Only the last save point is recorded. ERRORS AND WARNINGS WINDOW Improved behaviour for the Errors and Warnings window. The Errors and Warnings window now works a little differently. The E&W window will come to the front for errors so they are harder to miss/ignore. However there is a delay between how often errors are displayed so it doesn't keep coming to the front as quickly as you can dismiss it when there are many errors reported in a row. Any feedback on this new behaviour is welcomed. Fixed a problem where the wrong node would be opened when you double clicked an item in the E&W window. Clicking on the Warnings icon or text in the Errors and Warnings notification area (bottom right of main window) now shows the warnings when the Errors and Warnings window opens. Windows only: Fixed a bug with lists which could cause rows to be truncated. This was most obvious in the Errors and Warnings window. There's a new preference in the General prefs panel called "Show warnings in Errors and Warnings window by default". This controls whether warnings are shown in the E&W window by default. You might want to use this if you are bugged by the subdiv cache warnings the first time you render. You can still open the E&W window from the notification panel at bottom right of the main window. Added an item to the View menu to open the Errors and Warnings window. GENERAL The file default_preGI.xml is no longer included. Some changes have been made to the way progress windows are handled. Progress windows now only display after a short delay, which prevents situations where you get them flickering on and off the screen really quickly, as well as reducing the problem of them stealing focus when you're typing etc. A timer/wait cursor is shown for quick operations so you have an idea something is going on. Any feedback on this new behaviour is welcomed. Most lists now support type selection, which means the list selection will update as you type while the list has focus. Many things which are sorted alphabetically, certain menus for example, are now sorted using a natural order sort instead of a lexicographical sort. In short, the sorting will make a little more sense overall. Fixed some layout problems with vector and 2 vector params. Fixed a problem with file filtering in Open dialogs where "test.obj" could be selected but not "test.OBJ". Made some optimisations which will improve opening of complex project files and working with the network view etc. when there are a lot of nodes. We've made some pretty big changes to the way TG2 handles text items (i.e. strings) behind the scenes, so please let us know if you come across anything odd happening with text items. Please note that this change does not mean we have Unicode support or support for non-English characters. The shader/heightfield preview located to the right of the node list is no longer opened or changed when a node's parameter view is opened in a floating window. The idea is that this shader/heighfield preview corresponds to the last shader or heightfield that was opened in the panel below the node list. The recently opened files items are now retained if TG2 crashes. Fixed a crashing bug related to the number of items in popup menus. Windows only: Fixed a problem which could cause intermittent crashes. Windows only: Fixed a problem with double clicking on list items. Build 2.2.23.1 Fixed some rendering related memory leaks which could be quite considerable with larger images and/or rendering animations. (Some of these leaks were new in 2.2.) Perlin 3D Scalar is now thread safe. This fixes occasional spikes or dots in renders that use the Perlin 3D Scalar node. Build 2.2.22.1 PLEASE NOTE: The Mac release is a Public Beta and may not be suitable for production use. The user interface has changed to use Cocoa and we want to test it with a large audience before making a final release. Please report any bugs or unusual behaviour you come across. File handling changes: Safe saving for project files has been disabled. There were a few cases still where it didn't let you save project files. Please let us know if you have any issues saving project files. Windows only: Improved behaviour with UNC style file paths (i.e. \\SERVER\share\). One example of this is that it's now possible to save projects to the root level of a share. Mac only: Worked around a bug in OS X 10.6 which prevented making backup files when saving projects from working properly. Now works as expected on OS X 10.6. Project file open dialogs now open showing the location of the current project, if it has been saved already. Open file dialogs for node params now open showing their current location. The Obj reader node is now more flexible when looking for MTL files and will work with spaces in MTL filenames. A number of situations where text files are read (.chan, script, OBJ files etc.) now better handle different line endings across platforms. 3D Preview enhancements: Wireframe display of objects in the 3D Preview, and other display options: - The 3D Preview has a button to change the object display mode. You can switch between "Hidden", "Show bounding boxes" and "Show Wireframes". - Many objects now have a "Preview mode" parameter which allows you to control whether wireframes or bounding boxes can be displayed per object. - When you context click in the 3D Preview on the handle of objects which support the new "Preview mode" param there you can control the preview mode from the "Object Preview Mode" submenu in the context menu. There is an additional setting available here which lets you display bounding boxes in addition to wireframes. - Wireframes in populations use level-of-detail reduction to speed up the display. We'll improve the level-of-detail algorithms in future versions. Added Rule of Thirds composition guides to 3D Preview. It can be toggled on and off using the main "3" key. Disc and plane nodes now have handles and are selectable in the 3D Preview. Plane node is drawn differently in preview to help with positioning it. If you can't see the plane but can see the edges then you know you're looking at it from behind. Resetting the 3D Preview now also resets preset cameras to defaults. Improved tooltip handling for 3D Preview exposure slider. Render View enhancements: In the Render View you can toggle 'solo' display of the red, green and blue channels, as well as the alpha image. Default keys are 'r', 'g', 'b' and 'a' but they are customisable. Saving alpha image: If the alpha image is being viewed, pressing Save on the Render View will save the alpha image, not the RGB. (Alpha is still treated as a separate image because it may have spectral information that needs all 3 RGB channels.) Fixed location of context menu shown in render window. Mac only: Fixed some mouse interaction problems which were evident in the render window. Mac only: Fixed a render window destruction related crashing bug. "Preparing to render..." is displayed in the Render View before any renderer initialisation or scene setup is done, because sometimes an old status was displayed for a long time after starting a render. Renderer improvements: -rendernode command line option, which sets the master render node after autoloading the project. Windows only: Changed the detection of the number of processor cores. Hyperthreads are now counted as cores (or rather hyperthreading is no longer treated as a special case), and this change should also give a true count of the number of cores on a wider range of systems. Some older systems may now be counted incorrectly, but core detection can still be overridden in Preferences. "Ray trace atmosphere" option on the render node. If checked, the atmosphere will be rendered in a separate ray-traced pass and benefit from improved anti-aliasing. This is similar to "ray trace objects" but for atmosphere. It may also render faster by avoiding unnecessary overdraw of terrain and other surfaces by rendering those before the atmosphere, but speed and quality heavily depend on the anti-aliasing settings. If both ray trace objects and ray trace atmosphere are checked, they are rendered in the same ray-traced pass. Controls for are now available for the size of the buckets in a render. (Buckets are the tiles which make up the rendered image, which can be rendered in parallel using multi-threading.) The controls can be accessed via a button labeled "Bucket Controls..." on the Advanced tab of a render node. The maximum bucket size in pixels (X and Y) can be specified, and the automatic reduction of bucket sizes which is based on anti-aliasing and number of threads can be enabled or disabled. Camera has "shutter offset" parameter, which offsets the time (in frames) at which the motion blur shutter opens and closes. A shutter offset of 0 (the default) causes the shutter to open exactly on the frame number and close at frame + motion blur length. If, instead, you set shutter offset to -0.5 times the motion blur length, the motion blur will be centred on the current frame. Motion blur length, shutter offset and depth of field parameters (alpha builds only) have been moved to a new tab labeled Blur. Light sources (i.e. local, inverse-square light sources) have a maximum distance parameter, which can be used as an important optimisation when there are small (weak) light sources in a large environment. The maximum distance parameter also creates a linear falloff to 0 intensity at that distance. If you move the "strength" and "max distance" sliders so that they line up in the GUI, the intensity at that distance due to inverse square falloff alone would be 0.001. Improvements to soft shadows: - Soft shadows now use a slightly better sample distribution to slightly reduce noise. - Sunlight has a new option "Sample jitter". Default value is 1 which qualitatively matches the old behaviour, giving jittered stratified sampling which is statistically unbiased but produces noise. A value of 0 produces no noise, but introduces bias and stepping artefacts instead. This may be favourable in some situations, e.g. animations. - Soft shadows of Sunlight nodes no longer flicker between frames in an animation, provided that jitter is set to 0. Minor changes to some sampling patterns affecting GI. Detail jittering was always used even when disabled in render settings. This bug has now been fixed. "GI prepass padding option" can be used to enlarge (or shrink) the area of image calculated during the prepass, which may be useful to avoid mismatched lighting between adjacent cropped renders or pieces of a panorama. A value of 0 means no padding. A value of 1 adds a border to each side of the frustum which is equivalent to the width or height of the image or crop region, which makes the frustum 3 times as wide and 3 times as tall. Individual cloud layer transparency threshold changed to 0.001 (was 0.01). Implemented total integrated transparency threshold, set to 0.001. The change to the individual cloud layer threshold makes single cloud layers take a little longer to render but reduces incorrect sun glow through dense cloud. By implementing total integrated transparency threshold (all cloud layers and atmosphere integrated) total render time may be reduced, but may increase incorrect sun glow that may have been obscured by multiple clouds layer previously. Fixed a bug with the ray tracing of imported objects that have no UVs or UVWs. Default textures coordinates for these objects are now generated by the ray tracer, matching the behaviour of the micropolygon renderer. Displacement tolerance can be changed for objects. Note that this is only effective if the objects are not ray traced. Cloud Layer V2 changes: - Option to localise the cloud layer to a sphere of chosen centre and radius. This renders more quickly than similar effects done with the density shader network, and it allows more control over the falloff. The centre can be moved using a handle in the 3D preview, and dashed rings are drawn at the top and bottom of the cloud layer to represent the radius. Moving the centre automatically changes the cloud layer altitude. - There is a new option to use a 2D shadow map to render the shadows cast by clouds, which can be found on the new Optimisations tab. Currently this feature only works reliably if you have enabled "localise" on the Main tab. The size and position of the shadow map is determined by the localisation parameters "centre" and "radius", as it uses a rectangle which completely surrounds the localisation sphere in X and Z dimensions. The shadow map is generated whenever you render an image, and will not work in the 3D preview until it has been generated. Self shadowing does not use the shadow map. - Acceleration cache option has moved to a new Optimisations tab. - "Altitude offset function" on the Functions tab. Takes a function or colour shader which can vary in 3D space to offset the cloud's built-in vertical profile. Cloud cannot be created outside the altitude range defined by the main altitude and depth parameters, however. Units are metres, and there is a parameter to easily multiply the function by a constant value. - "Depth modulator" on the Functions tab. Takes a function or colour shader which can vary in 3D space to multiply or reduce the height of the built-in vertical profile. Cloud cannot be created outside the altitude range defined by the main altitude and depth parameters, however. A parameter named "Centre" defines the pivot about which the depth is multiplied, with values normally between 0 and 1. 0 means modulation of height above the cloud base; 1 means modulation of the depth below the cloud top. - "Final density modulator" on the Functions tab. Takes a function or colour shader which can vary in 3D space to multiply or reduce the final density of the cloud after all other built-in clipping and cutoffs have been applied. - New option "anisotropic enviro light". Enabled by default. When enabled, enviro light (GI or Ambient Occlusion) contributions are weighted more strongly in the forward viewing direction than the backward viewing direction for thin clouds, and more strongly in the backward direction than the forward direction for dense clouds. The "fake internal scattering" parameter controls the change from forward scattering in thin cloud to back scattering in dense clouds, as well as brightening the contribution of direct light sources on dense clouds. If fake internal scattering is 0 while anisotropic enviro light is enabled, cloud density has no effect on enviro light contributions and they are predominantly forward scattering everywhere. The "sun glow" settings also affect the contrast between forward- and back-scattering weightings. - Below the cloud colour parameter, the maximum possible albedo corresponding to that colour is shown. A colour of 0.25 corresponds to 100% maximum theoretical albedo if there is sufficient cloud density, GI and fake internal scattering to achieve it. - Fake internal scattering slider goes up to 2 (was 1). - Changes to some default values. Planet Atmosphere changes: - New option "anisotropic enviro light". Enabled by default. When enabled, enviro light (GI or Ambient Occlusion) contributions are weighted more strongly in the forward viewing direction than the backward viewing direction, to simulate preferential forward scattering. The anisotropism (the contrast between forward- and back-scattering weightings) is affected by the bluesky glow settings and the haze glow settings, with bluesky and haze components being lit independently. With the default settings, the haze component has greater anisotropism than the bluesky component. - Changed default enviro light contribution to 1 (was 0.5). Miscellaneous changes: Object shaders can be reassigned without forcing the object to reload or regenerate. Terragen now reads RGB and RGBA 32-bit EXRs. New node: Null Shader. This is a shader which does nothing except pass through its input. The input can be any shader or function node. The Null Shader might be useful for redirecting flow in complex networks. Use it however you wish. Inserting a non-atmosphere shader into a chain of atmosphere shaders will allow the atmosphere shaders above it to render even though the non-atmosphere shader will not render anything. This means that any shader (e.g. the Null Shader) can be used as a pass-through node, which might be useful in complex networks. The last shader connected to a planet can be any kind of shader and its inputs will still work. Still, only atmosphere shaders (i.e. Planet Atmospheres or Cloud Layers) are actually rendered. This is part of the changes to allow Null Shaders to be inserted anywhere in a chain of atmosphere shaders. "Stitchable border" option in Heightfield Shader, which causes the border blending zone to fall half outside the heightfield bounds and half inside. The outside region uses data which is copied from the border. To stitch adjacent heightfields you also need to uncheck "flatten first". The Simple shape shader now has "Position key" params in the Colour and Displacement tabs which let you control the position used to calculate the effect. Fake Stones Shader: fixed broken stones with "blend as stone density". Fixed a Shader array bug which caused array instances to vanish as you moved further from the origin. Fixed a problem with the Power Fractal Shader V3 when displacement spike limit is 0. Some internal changes to the handling of key frame interpolation. This shouldn't have any effect on the working of Terragen. Updated versions of various libraries that Terragen uses. There have been some changes to the libraries created by the installer on Windows. Other GUI improvements: Tweaked many node param view layouts. Fixed some list redraw problems (different problems on Mac and Windows). Windows only: List controls now have better tabbing behaviour. Windows only: Fixed a potential hang when modifying key bindings in the Customise Input Bindings window. Mac only: Made some improvements to control focus handling. This problem was shown by interaction problems with 3D Preview navigation panels when more than one 3D Preview was open. Param colour buttons now support HDR values when dragging and dropping. The "Add Terrain" button now adds terrain nodes in the expected place (above the Compute Terrain node) even when all other terrain have been deleted, as long as the Compute Terrain node still exists and is connected to the planet. (Bug 50) Improved node tooltip behaviour in network view, mainly obvious in Mac version. Group nodes now update their colour in the network view when it's changed. Improved copy/paste behaviour. Added Select All item to Edit menu. Mac only: Fixed a bug which could cause a modal dialog crash on OS X 10.5. This was most apparent with a crash when dismissing the splash screen for the Free version. Mac only: Adjusted layout of Measure window to suit Cocoa control sizing. Mac only: Progress dialogs no longer stay above windows of all applications. Mac only: Fixed some timer related bugs. Fixed a potential crash when closing param floaters. Node name params no longer allow non-ASCII characters and the "/" character to be entered. Changes to the View menu. The order has changed, and some of the keyboard shortcuts have changed to improve self consistency. Added "Customise Default Paths" items to the File Saving prefs panel. These let you customise the locations for several paths. At the moment the two paths supported are for the temporary files location (temp files created at the end of rendering) and the sequence output path (where animation frames are created). Optimised creation of recently opened files menus to give better performance in a network environment. Windows only: Changed the way messages boxes present title and message text. Windows only: Fixed a problem which caused the 3D Preview Location window to be the wrong size. Some text that was accidentally written into projects and clips containing cloud layers and planet atmospheres (GUI information about ray traced shadows) is no longer written. Build 2.1.18.1 Performance warning dialog is no longer shown if you have more than 4 cores. Threading performance has improved enough that this is no longer an issue, though there are still improvements to be made. Reduced render time: The Render View shows an unfiltered, aliased preview of each bucket while it is rendering, and then computes the anti-aliasing pixel filters when the bucket is completed. This shortens the total render time, especially with high anti-aliasing settings, certain pixel filters, and anti-aliasing bloom. Finished renders should look the same as before. The renderer now has an option called "Ray trace objects". This uses an adaptive ray tracing pass to render objects, with quality determined by the anti-aliasing settings. This affects any objects which can be used in populations, i.e. imported objects, the built-in Grass Clump and the built-in Rock object. "Ray trace objects" usually gives superior quality images of populations compared with the micropolygon renderer, and often with shorter render times. Very good results can be obtained with anti-aliasing presets between 5 and 8. Displacements applied to these objects are not seen by the ray tracer, but the displacement information is interpreted as bump to affect shading. Anti-aliasing adaptive sampling settings can be completely customised, or you can use the preset values for each anti-aliasing level. "Ray trace everything" option in the render node. This may be useful in scenes where atmospheres and clouds can be rendered more efficiently by the adaptive ray tracer than by the micropolygon renderer. For most typical scenes, however, this option should be disabled. The Quick Render node in the default project has anti-aliasing set to 2, now that anti-aliasing has a greater impact on render times for objects rendered with "Ray trace objects". Fixed two serious bugs with the rendering of populations. One bug caused the level-of-detail calculations to be incorrect and reduced image quality, the second bug caused objects close to the camera to be rendered incorrectly and possibly had other side effects which might have affected stability. All of these problems have now been fixed. Improved responsiveness of the user interface while rendering. Other changes which improve multi-threading performance. Fixed the "black triangles" bug (bug 143). Fixed a bug in ray tracing faces that are parallel to the object's bounding box sides (bug 149, possibly bug 139). The number of motion blur time steps used by the micropolygon renderer is always the square of a power of 2, to cooperate with some changes to the pixel sampler. 1 step is used for AA 1; 4 steps for AA 2; 16 steps for AA 3 and 4; 64 steps for AA 5 to 8; 256 steps for AA 9 to 16. "Lock subdiv to frame" option in the render node. This allows the subdivision of ray traced geometry (i.e. shadow-casting and reflection-casting geometry) to be calculated the same for all frames in an animation, based on a chosen frame number. This avoids certain animation glitches and works best if the view does not differ greatly from the chosen lock frame. Slight change to how surface normals are rendered close to silhouette edges. Various other improvements to the ray tracer. Slight speed improvement to "GI surface details". Improvements to GI coverage at low sampling rates in Cloud Layer V2 and Planet Atmosphere and possibly other situations. Added a new shader called "Simple shape shader". It's a colour and displacement shader which can create circles and polygons. An application which springs to mind is use as a blend shader. Added a new shader called "Shader array". It's a colour and displacement shader which can create a rectangular array of one instance of another shaders. It's a bit like like a populator for shaders, although it is designed for a regular grid rather than random placement. The shader array has a "Limit effect area" param which limits the effect to a certain area. The "Boundary padding" param controls how far outside the outer rows and columns the shader array effects are applied. If you adjust the boundary padding to tightly enclose the shaders used in the array rendering performance will be improved. Added a Contour shader which creates topo map-like contour lines. Added an Arctan2 scalar function node which implements the atan2 function. Added a PI scalar function node to the Constants group which outputs PI. Cloud Layer V2: New parameter "step optimisation". Larger values allow the clouds to render faster by skipping over larger regions with negative density values, but artefacts may be introduced if the parameter is set too high. Cloud Layer V2: Get Altitude and Get Altitude in Texture function nodes now work correctly when used in density shader/function networks. Cloud Layer V2: "Ray fuzziness" parameter. This randomises sample positions around the ray cast from the camera, by an amount that is relative to micropolygon size. A populator's area can be rotated on any axis. Object spacing has independent control in X and Z. There is also a new parameter to control the randomness vs. regularity of the object rows and colums. The populator has an option to clip instances to the region seen by the camera, reducing memory requirements, the time taken to create instances, and render times. Beware that if you use this option, shadows and reflections will not be cast by objects that can't be seen directly by the camera. The populator has an "Ultra quality" render quality setting, even higher than "Very high quality". This is currently for testing purposes, and is not recommended for normal use. The populator's render quality setting only has an effect when "Ray trace objects" is disabled, i.e. using the original micropolygon renderer. Other minor improvements to the rendering of populations with the micropolygon renderer, although we now recommend that you use "ray trace objects" instead. Fixed a bug with Planet Atmosphere's "enable secondary" parameter. It now affects GI contributions and higher reflections depths. The Default Shader's reflectivity and specular roughness can be controlled by image maps and by functions, just like all the other important attributes. Specular roughness can even be different in each of the RGB channels if you supply a colour image or function. Reflection Shader: higher light depths only use 1 sample for soft reflections, regardless of the samples parameter, to greatly reduce render times in some situations. Fixed a bug in Compute Terrain that gave incorrect texture coordinates when "smooth surface" was enabled. Power fractal shader v3: Changes to feature scale cause recalculation of the number of octaves. Previously this only worked with lead-in scale and smallest scale. Corrected a few minor problems with the ray tracing of imported objects and the Grass Clump. This fixes some minor problems in reflections, GI, and direct rendering of objects using the new ray tracing mode. Sliders for "GI relative detail" and "GI sample quality" now only go up to 3, to suggest that higher values aren't needed in most situations. (Higher values can still be entered by hand.) The anti-aliasing slider now only goes up to 8, although higher values can still be entered by hand. Now that objects can be rendered using ray tracing, anti-aliasing usually doesn't need to be set as high as before. Enable/disable of multiple nodes in the network view can now be undone with one undo instead of several. Nodes which don't have an Enable param (i.e. groups, Heightfield generate) can no longer have their enabled state toggled in the network view. Projects are now marked as modified when nodes are moved or resized. Fixed a problem with network view bookmarks where mouse over highlighting could become disabled. Disabled sunlight nodes are no longer displayed on the perimeter of the 3D Preview navigation compass. TIFF/GeoTIFF added to the list of file filters in the Heightfield Load dialog. Fixed window parenting problems with some floating param views. Changed the network view zooming behaviour using the mouse or mouse wheel. The network view now zooms so the network view location under the mouse stays constant. This lets you position the mouse anywhere in the view and have that area stay more or less in view. Zooming using the keys still happens around the centre of the view. Improved the network view behaviour when you paste nodes. Pasted nodes are always centred in the view and the view will fit to them if necessary. Tweaked some node param view layouts. Windows only: Window contents now resize properly when using Aero Snap on Windows 7. Windows only: Split pane splitter bars now look better on Windows 7 both in Windows 7 and Classic themes. Fixed some problems with opening render node param views while rendering. The "active" render node can not be changed while a render is in progress. Changed default project so that platform-specific defaults are used for render output filenames. (The default project does not specify the filenames.) Made some changes to param view management. Crop region drag handles now stay a constant size independent of camera configuration. They also show up for orthographic cameras now (bug 142). Added "Reset orientation" item to the Reset camera button menu. This resets the orientation of the orthographic preset cameras. Fixed a bug where the network connections could become different to the actual network state (bug 145). Fixed a Parts shader node bug which prevented proper update of node names in network view and project view lists (bug 146). Mac only: Fixed a bug where items in hierarchic lists might not update immediately when their text was changed (bug 147). The camera's field of view (in perspective mode) can now be specified using focal length and film aperture (film back) parameters. The camera has more options for importing .chan files. Removed the Copy to render camera, Choose camera and Reset camera buttons from standalone heightfield/shader preview windows. Nodes in the network view now have a plus icon on the right to show when they have internal nodes. Network view node tooltips now say "Has internal nodes" if a node has internal nodes. Deep version has "Reveal Key File" item in the Help menu, which ... reveals your key file. Mac only: Worked around an edit text field display problem on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, where edit text fields with text in them could appear blank or have the text truncated. Fixed a bug where scrubbing the time line (next/previous frame buttons) didn't make the 3D Preview update. Fixed a crashing bug which was caused by connecting an input of an internal node to the output of its containing node. Some changes to the way floating param views are handled. Node connections are highlighted when you mouse over a node input or output in the network view. The width/height/aspect ratio of the 3D Preview now updates when you change the relevant values in the render node. Fixed a bug where the Tan scalar node would be created instead of the Arctan scalar node when you tried to create an Arctan scalar node. Made some improvements to mouse handling in network view bookmarks. Some changes have been made to the project file safe saving. Please let us know of any problems saving project files. Mac only: Safe saving changes made above allow you to save project files on drives/volumes/partitions other than the OS volume ( i.e. secondary hard drives, thumb drives, network drives etc. ). Fixed a problem where nodes inside other nodes (aside from Group nodes) didn't show up in "Assign shader" and similar submenus. You now insert clip files into the internal networks of nodes. The Network View you insert a clip file into now zooms to fit its contents. This helps out with the situation where newly inserted nodes might not be inside the current view area of the Network View, which can give the impression no nodes were inserted. The 3D Preview display problem characterised by thick bounding box lines and incorrect clipping should now be fixed. Added Undo support for Group Capture Nodes and Group Release Nodes. Parameter views are managed a new way internally. You can now only have one parameter view open for a particular node. You should now not be able to open a param view in a floater while it's being shown in the main window. This should also address the problem where a param view in the main window wasn't closed properly and new ones drew over the top. This was most evident on the Mac. Please let us know if you experience any odd behaviour with param views. Labels in the network view, such as node names, can now be truncated when they are too large to fit in the node. You can mouse over them to see the full name in a tooltip. Added a preference to the Network View prefs panel which allows you to set whether or not node label text is truncated. Tooltips are always shown for nodes in the network view. Previously you could turn this on or off using the "Show special tooltips" preference. A number of changes have been made to the network view bookmarks, on the left hand side. The bookmarks now have a fixed size instead of stretching and squashing as the view is resized. When there are too many bookmarks to all be displayed at once scroll buttons appear and you can scroll through them. Bookmark labels are truncated if they are too long for the bookmark, but you can mouse over the truncated bookmarks to see the full name in a tooltip. Render nodes no longer have their "Camera" parameter set to "Render Camera" by default, which means you will need to make the connection to the camera of your choice manually when you create a new render node. Colour parameters can now be animated. Addressed a crashing bug if you tried to set a keyframe on the Project "Current frame" param. This param is no longer animatable. Added a "Break connection" item to node input context menus. Node inputs or outputs which have an invisible connection to a node in a different level of the hierarchy ( i.e. a node inside a group which has a connection from a node at the same level as the group ) now have little arrows to the left of them to give an indication there is actually a connection. Customisations to mouse wheel bindings (i.e. zooming in or out) are now recognised in the 3D Preview and network view. Added specific bindings for zoom in and zoom out to the 3D Preview. You can now zoom in and out in using keys in 3D Preview, although none are set up by default and you will need to add them in the Customise Input Bindings dialog. Conflicts between bindings are handled a bit better in the Customise Input Bindings dialog. "Save as" File menu item now has a Ctrl-Shift-S/Cmd-Shift-S shortcut. Menus like "Go to Group" in the network view context menu, which list groups, are now in alphabetical order. Fixed a problem with node resizing when resizing diagonally. Fixed a bug where Painted shaders in default project files would not be registered properly. In some circumstances the default project file would show up in the File menu "Open Recent" submenu, this has now been stopped. Windows only: Fixed a problem on Vista where menubars were not drawn properly when a secondary view window was first opened. Windows only: You can now drag and drop files on "Choose file" buttons in param views again. These are buttons whose icon has a little folder and an arrow, such as beside the "Filename" param in the TGO Reader or "Image filename" param for the Image map shader. Windows only: TG2 will now open a project file which you've double clicked on in Explorer, or dragged and dropped on the application icon, as long as project files are associated with TG2. Build 2.0.3.1 Cloud Layer V2's "fake internal scattering" no longer applies to the Enviro Light component. Some detail may be lost from shadowed areas of clouds, but the detail looked bad in many situations. Reduced depth resolution of GI in clouds and atmosphere to improve speed. Previous resolution can still be obtained by increasing atmosphere and cloud samples if necessary. Fixed a bug which exhibited itself by a crash if you tried to save a .tgd file which contained file or node paths containing ampersands ("&"). Build 2.0.2.1 Fixed gaps in ray tracing caused by a bug that was new in 2.0.1.1. Fixed a problem which caused the number of cores to be incorrectly reported on the Splash Screen. You can now show or hide all floating windows using a menu item in the Windows menu. See the menu for the shortcut. Param views opened from the Cloud Pattern button are now parented to the main window (only really effects Windows). Windows only: Fixed a bug which resulted in not being able to save project files to the root level of a drive (i.e. c:\ or d:\). Windows only: Improved behaviour of floating windows so they no longer float above all other windows. Build 2.0.1.1 Rendering: No more 16-texture limit: OBJ Readers now create a "Parts Shader" containing nodes corresponding to the shader groups found in the OBJ. There is no fixed limit to the number of parts. Some of the built-in objects have an adjustable displacement tolerance parameter. This can be used if you find that large displacements or spikey surfaces are causing errors at tile/bucket boundaries or gaps in ray-traced shadows. Be careful not to touch this setting unless you need to, because it can dramatically increase render times. The default value for most objects is 1, but lower values can be used to render relatively flat surfaces more quickly. Improved quality of GI in clouds and atmospheres by adjusting an internal compression threshold. Two new render settings on the Advanced tab which control the region in which ray traced polygons are fully subdivided. Outside of this region the ray traced polygons are only coarsely subdivided. Previously this region was the frustum seen by the rendered image or crop region, but now you can also choose to have no detail or to have detail everywhere within the camera frustum regardless of crop settings. "Ray detail region padding" can be used to enlarge (or shrink) the region. A value of 0 means no padding. A value of 1 adds a border to each side of the frustum which is equivalent to the width or height of the image or crop region, which makes the frustum 3 times as wide and 3 times as tall. A small improvement to the performance of multi-threaded rendering. A performance warning is displayed if Terragen is set up to use more than 4 processor cores. You can disable this warning if you wish. Reduced the amount of memory used by the LWO Micro Exporter during rendering. The visible sun sphere now aligns correctly with its glow in atmospheres and specular highlights when the camera is at large distances from the origin. Precision of values in .tgd and .tgc files increased to 10 signficicant figures (was 6). Terrain and shaders: Greyscale 32-bit floating point images are now readable via FreeImage. This includes TIFF and GEOTIFF (tested) and EXR (untested). Georeferencing features: - Heightfield Load reads associated .tfw "world file" when reading .tif images. The correct X and Y scaling is calculated depending on the latitude/longitude of the file. - Heightfield Load has georeferencing settings. Latitude/longitude coordinates can be specified for the 4 corners of the heightfield. These are also read automatically from the associated .tfw "world file" when reading .tif images. - Heightfield Shader uses georeferencing settings provided by Heightfield Load, if set. - Planet has "lat long at apex" parameter so that georeferenced heightfields can be remapped to (0,0,0) in world space. If one of your heightfields is georeferenced to (39, -106), for example, enter (39, -106) in the Planet's apex to bring the heightfield back to home. Heightfield Shader's bounding box and handle are correctly vertically scaled/positioned when height multiplier is not 1. Heightfield Resize no longer automatically rescales vertically; it is now optional. Power Fractal Shader V3 works with negative displacement amplitudes again. Merge Shader: The "Lowest (cut away)" mode of "Choose by altitude" now works. Painted Shader improvements: Painted Shader brush strokes are now continuous, to a point. If you moved the brush too fast you could previously get a stroke which looked like a series of dots, it now looks like a proper continuous stroke. You might still get dots if you try to paint a really long distance in one stroke, there are limits due to performance. Paint more slowly :-). Painted Shader now paints if you just click. Previously you had to move the mouse before it started painting. Made some optimisations and improvements to the Painted Shader. Unfortunately there are still situations where it will crash, but the chances of that are reduced. Undo improvements: Fixed some problems with undoing group, ungroup and delete nodes. Node name undo now works. Making node connections using the context menu in the Network View is now undoable. Added a "This cannot be undone" warning dialog for the 3D Preview reset. Fixed a bug where the Purge Undo dialog only had an "OK" button. Other User Interface improvements: Fixed problems with some tooltips on Vista and potentially Windows 2000. These are the "special" tooltips, used in the node network and 3D Preview. Previously these could cause crashes on Vista and W2k. It's now safe to turn on the "Show special tooltips" setting in the General preferences panel. Special tooltips are now shown by default on all OSes (see General prefs panel). Main window is hidden correctly when running from the command line with -hide. Splash screen. New About Box. Added some new button icons, tweaked some old ones. In some situations '\' and '/' characters in file paths and filenames are automatically replaced by the correct path separator for the OS. This means that '\' cannot be safely used in filenames in this version. It is still OK as a path separator. We may change this in future. New "File Saving" preferences panel. Creation of backup files when you save projects can be controlled from the File Saving prefs panel. This is also available on the Mac now, if you wish to use it. Added incremental saving for project files. This adds a version number to the project filename which can be incremented using the new "Save Incremental" item in the File menu. You can set project saving to always be incremental (i.e. increments when you save using the "Save" item or ctrl/cmd-S shortcut) in the File Saving prefs panel. New "Open Online Documentation in Browser" item in Help menu, will link to TG2 documentation. Added help buttons to param views. These will eventually open the documention for the node in a browser. The 3D Preview now has an exposure slider. Click the "+/-" button in the bottom left to show it. This lets you experiment with exposure more easily, as if you were using a camera. Added measuring tools. You can turn on measure mode in 3D Previews using a key ('m' by default) or by clicking the measure button in the top panel of the preview. Starting a measure session opens a floating measure window which gives various dimensions of the measurement line. Measurement can be locked to x, y or z axes using the buttons at the bottom of the window. Exit measure mode by pressing the key, button or closing the measure window. Distance from the camera to the cursor in 3D Previews is now displayed in the 3D Preview Location window. "Navigation Panel" prefs panel renamed to "Navigation". Added compass to 3D Previews to show heading. Can be toggled on and off, see the Mouse and Key Settings window for the binding. Can also be shown in heightfield/shader previews. See Navigation prefs panel to control visibility. Added key navigation/camera movement to the 3D Preview. See the Mouse and Key Settings window for the bindings. These can be customised as well, of course. The altitude, coordinates and slope angle under the mouse in the 3D Preview can be copied using the context menu. These can also be pasted into text files, forum posts etc. in other applications. Vector params (e.g. object positions) can now be copied and pasted using the menu panel button to the right of the last edit field for the param. The button has a clipboard icon. These can also be pasted into text files, forum posts etc. in other applications. You can drag and drop from colour buttons in TG2 to text files, forum posts etc. in other applications. A render hotkey has been added, which opens the Render window and starts rendering the current render node. See the Project menu for the hotkey/shortcut. The Assign node submenus are now hierarchic/multi-level and sorted alphabetically. There are now checks to stop circular paths being made in the node network. These could previously cause a crash. Windows only: Added a View menu to the secondary view window menu bar. Windows only: Windows now have TG2 titlebar icons. Mac only: URL static text (as in the About Box) now responds to clicks. Mac only: Added an icon and application information for TGO files. Mac only: Finally sorted out the mac_command_line.txt CLI document. Windows only: The view window Edit menu now has the Duplicate/Group/Ungroup commands. Mac only: Abort buttons now work in progress dialogs. Mac only: The main window now has a proxy icon for the project file and no longer displays the project file path. Fixed a crash when deleting nodes. Made some changes to prevent crashes when the last camera node was deleted. Windows only: Fixed an event processing problem which made operations which used progress dialogs go faster if you wiggled the mouse. Windows only: Improved list cell width calculation, fixes problem with list item text clipping. Windows only: Improved and optimised list behaviour. Mac only: Fixed a problem where TG2 wouldn't open files dropped on the application icon before the application was running. The application would start up but it wouldn't open the file. Mac only: Fixed a problem with the text size in certain windows such as the Measure window and 3D Preview Location window. Mac only: Fixed some problems with floating window backgrounds, as previously exhibited by 3D Preview Location and Measure windows. Menus can now enable/disable their items according to the context. For example when the 3D Preview is focused the Edit menu Cut/Copy/Paste/Delete etc. items aren't enabled because it doesn't support those commands. Project modification tracking is now handled in what should be a more accurate manner. There have been changes to some other aspects to go along with this, for example if you go to exit TG2 and there are no unsaved changes then you don't see the "Exit/Cancel/Save and Exit" dialog anymore, TG2 just exits. It's no longer possible to resize group nodes in such a way, for example, that the left edge moves past the right edge. Close button now shows again in the top panel of 3D/shader previews opened in view windows. Fixed some mouse interaction problems in the navigation panel and navigation window. The Delete item in the Edit menu now deletes items from project view lists. Windows only: Changed some behaviour for floating windows. Windows only: Fixed some resize problems with the separator line, this will be mainly evident in windows like the 3D Preview Location and Measure windows. Windows only: Fixed a problem where part of the OpenGL part of the 3D Preview could be hidden in a certain situation. Windows only: Menus are now always drawn themed on Vista. Previously menus that had menu items with icons were drawn unthemed. Windows only: Fixed the problem where elements in OpenGL views, such as the navigation panel in the 3D Preview, would sometimes just draw as solid coloured rectangles. Fixed a problem where starting or opening a new project while rendering could cause a crash. Fixed a problem with bitmap caching which caused the Navigation Window to draw incorrectly on Windows in certain situations. Windows only: Fixed a problem where clicking on a file param button would not open the appropriate dialog when certain file paths were used. Mac only: Save dialogs now display default names better in some situations. Mac only: Fixed issue which lead to the Pause button in the Render window having an extraneous ampersand. Split panes now update in realtime on Vista. This improves their drawing with OpenGL views (3D Preview/network view) but it could still be better. Split pane splitter bars now look better on Vista both in Vista and Classic themes. Optimised list performance. Optimised bitmap/image usage. Optimised project view updating. If a camera's position is animated, its path is displayed in all previews which show the camera. You can change the colour in the Interface Colours prefs panel. Groups are now shown in the Node Network project view list. Nodes in the internal networks of groups are also now shown, as children of the group items. Groups now have icons in node lists. Windows only: The mechanism behind the "Explore Temporary Files" menu item has been changed. It no longer opens a command window and should give a much better user experience. Windows only: Improved key navigation in alerts/message boxes. Improved the Errors and Warnings window behaviour. If you uncheck the "Show warnings" check box then this setting will still apply next time you open the window. The window also doesn't get shown again for subsequent warnings. Main window is slightly wider on startup so that the toolbars at the top of the window are all in one row. Build 1.10.23.1 (beta release candidate) Undo and Undo History. There is no particular limit on the number of actions that can be undone, except for available memory. Painted Shader. Allows you to paint masks or surface colours in the previews, including the 3D Preview. It is a colour shader which you can use just like any other surface shader for distributing populations, blend shaders, etc. To start painting, click the menu button labeled 'B' (the Paint menu button) at the top of a preview and select "Start painting shader". From that submenu you can create and paint a new shader or continue painting with an exiting Painted Shader. More options are available from the Paint menu button while in painting mode and on the Painted Shader's parameter window. Mouse and keyboard shortcuts can be found in Preferences or Help -> Mouse and Key Settings. Improved cloud rendering speed in multi-threaded renders by improving the memory handling for the cloud acceleration cache. Also slightly improved speed of the acceleration cache regardless of thread settings. "Microvertex jittering" option in the renderer, which reduces the appearance of parallel lines in the subdivison pattern of surfaces. This was often a problem on water, for example. "Detail jittering" option in the renderer. 6 pixel filters to choose from, including Box, Tent, Narrow Cubic, Cubic B-Spline, Mitchell-Netravali, Catmull-Rom. "Box" gives the same results as previous versions. Anti-aliasing bloom option to reduce aliasing of pixels that are too bright to be handled by normal anti-aliasing techniques. It uses a combination of pixel and subpixel convolutions. Very bright points and edges appear to expand and are slightly softened with this option enabled. Enabled by default for new renderers except the default project's Quick Render. Default value for detail blending is now 0, for faster renders. For animations you may wish to increase detail blending. Fixed a ray tracing bug that could cause incorrect reflections close to recently traces shadows or vice versa. Fixed a problem where the more renders you did in a session, the longer it would take between the render finishing and the final image being displayed in the render window. This might appear as the render window going blank for some time after a render finished. It also stops memory usage climbing when a render finishes, as well as potentially preventing a crash on render completion. Surface layers now have an "Enable test colour" param in the Colour tab. Checking the checkbox will cause the test colour to override the layer's colour or colour function. This should help with tweaking surface layers. Rock object: - Can now be moved, scaled, rotated and populated properly. It now only appears as a bounding box in the 3D Preview, however. - Normals can be smoothed. - Rock supports "unique variations" when used in a populator. The number of unique variations is specified in the Rock object. - No longer crashes when diameter is set to 0. Fixed a bug in the Grass Clump that allowed its transform to be reset whenever the object was regenerated (e.g. after changing a parameter). Fixed a bug in Compute Terrain and Compute Normal that would cause incorrect displacement and normals when multiple Compute Terrain or Compute Normals nodes were used. Image Map Shader: - If projection type is "Through Camera" and there is no camera specified, the shader will no longer crash when it is called in a non-render situation (e.g. preview calculating the height above the terrain, or population distribution). The shader will return without applying any changes to the state in this case. - Flip x and Flip y parameters are now working. Cloud Layer V2: - A new option called "darker unresolved scattering". This causes the clouds to scatter less GI light at distances which are too short to be adequately resolved by the GI samples in the pre-pass. Without this option, light often blurs too far into the dark parts of clouds. - Fixed a crash in the cloud layer acceleration cache. - Cloud layer presets which use the 2D method set the acceleration cache to None. This avoids blocky shadows which are usually more apparent with 2D clouds. Changed the default glow settings in Planet Atmosphere and Cloud Layer V2. Filename sequences (e.g. using %04d to represent the frame number) in the Image Map Shader now work in the GUI. These images are reloaded whenever the frame number is changed in the timeline and while rendering an image sequence. Other user interface fixes and improvements: Preferences option to turn off special tooltips (3D Preview, Network View, Navigation Window), because these tooltips could cause crashes on some Windows systems. Camera and Renderer lists now have node creation buttons (i.e. "Add Camera" button ). The "Add Layer" and "Add Child Layer" menus on the Shaders list have been simplified by removing the unnecessary "Surface Shader" submenu. Improved the selection behaviour of the node lists when new items are added. Errors and Warnings window now reformats messages so they display on just one line. This was mainly an issue on Windows, and could cause problems such as only seeing part of a message. Fixed a small memory leak in the 3D Preview navigation panel, which could also lead to GDI handles leaking on Windows. Mac only: Tweaked the layout of controls underneath the certain node lists. Customise Input Bindings window now supports restrictions on the type of binding (key/mouse/mouse wheel) you can apply to an action. Fixed some problems with the custom input bindings system. Windows only: Fixed a longstanding bug where opening param floaters from a choose node button (i.e. Surface shader button in OBJ reader node) would lead to the param floater not having correct floating behaviour. This could lead to it disappearing behind the main window when opened, for instance. Mac only: Fixed a problem where opening a secondary view (new network view/3D preview) from a context menu in the network view or 3D preview would open the new window but then immediately move it behind the window being clicked in. This could give the impression the new window wasn't opened at all. Also stops a param floater being disabled when opened from a context click on a node. Fixed a problem where the timeline slider wouldn't update fully if you set the current frame to a value outside its range. Mac only: Key repeat now works, for example if you click in the 3D Preview and press the Increase Exposure key the exposure will increase until you release the key. Previously you would have had to press the key multiple times. Fixed a bug where using custom input presets stopped shift-click multiple selection working in the network view. Fixed a problem with the 3D Preview Location window, which appeared to be blank. Windows only: Fixed a crashing bug in the terrain and shaders node lists, which happened if you used the move up/down buttons after creating a new item in the list and before selecting an item in the list Windows only: Fixed a bug which stopped navigation in the movement ring working correctly for nav panels in 3D Previews. ------------------------ Build 1.9.99.1 (public) Visible to Camera, Visible to Other Rays and Cast Shadows are options on most objects (not including Planet). Some changes to Fresnel and transparency calculations in Water Shader and Reflective Shader. Object readers and Grass Clump do not need to reload/regenerate when Cast Shadows is toggled. Fixed a bug with shadows cast by reflective objects. This improves speed, fixes a bug that could hang a render, and fixes a visible artefact with soft shadows from such objects. Object ray-trace acceleration structure (BIH) is limited to a depth of 30, which prevents crashes in badly-behaved object geometry. CloudLayerV2 and PlanetAtmosphere use non-infinite lightsources more correctly. Possibly fixes some rendering errors with light sources in atmospheres. "Planet surface shader" is no longer available from the menus. This shader is not recommended and will not be developed further. Surface Layer: Blend by shader feature, with option to "blend as coverage" which interacts nicely with the other constraints and effects. Fuzzy zone softness is moved to the Effects tab. Fixed a bug in the Intersect Underlying feature which would give the wrong results at constraint boundaries or when coverage was very low. Distribution Shader V4: Blend by shader options, similar to those in Surface Layer. Slope key options similar to Surface Layer. Altitude constraints can be keyed off either "final position" or "position in texture". Some changes to parameter GUI updates, so that parameter text boxes update to the correct colours in all situations (add key, timeline scroll, etc.). Animation keys can be removed (via the parameter animation/import menu). Changed name of Mouse Settings preferences panel to Input Settings. Added support for customising input bindings, see the Input Settings preferences panel. ------------------------ Build 1.9.98.1 (public) Fixed a memory leak that was recently introduced into the atmosphere/cloud integrator. Improved speed of renders that use more than 1 thread. The main application thread was doing unnecessary work due to a recent bug. Fixed a bug in the rendering of populations with multiple threads. This bug resulted in parts of objects being missing in some buckets (tiles). /LARGEADDRESSAWARE: Able to take advantage of the /3GB switch supported by some 32-bit versions of Windows and 4GB of address space on 64-bit Windows. This allows Terragen to use more virtual memory than the 2Gb which it was previously limited to. Render nodes have two new options to control the "subdiv cache", which is used to render ray traced shadows, reflections and GI rays: Size of subdiv cache in Mb: The total amount of memory allowed for the subdiv caches. Each thread has its own subdiv cache which will be allowed only a portion of this total. The default value is 400 Mb. There is a hard minimum of 50 Mb per thread. Preallocate subdiv cache: Specify whether the entire quota of memory for subdiv caches is allocated at the start of each render, rather than only allocated in increments when needed. This usually increases memory use, but may help to identify memory allocation errors sooner rather than later during the render. The ray tracer is more robust with small subdiv caches, although demanding scenes will still benefit from large subdiv caches. Ability to override the detection of the number of processor cores, in Preferences -> Startup. Changed detection of number of cores. Only renders with maximum threads set to 0 are rendered completely within the main application thread, otherwise a separate thread is used for bucket rendering. This is technically a bug fix. The difference between 0-threaded and 1-threaded renders remains because it may be useful for debugging. Ray tracing of non-subdivisible objects (imported objects and Grass Clump) and populations now uses a different hierarchy structure (BIH) which uses less memory and allows faster rendering. This change also eliminates a conflict between threads that could potentially cause problems. Improved memory handling for scenes with a very large number of instances. Populator v3 no longer automatically repopulates when a parameter change occurs in clouds or other shaders which are connected to the planet, unless they also influence the population through other connections. This does not eliminate all situations where repopulation occurs unnecessarily, however. The number of micro triangles is reported when a render finishes. Fixed a crash in Image Map Shader with Through Camera projection and no camera attached. Fixed a bug that would render parts of the atmosphere completely black where the rays went below its floor altitude, often affecting planets in the distance. Improvements to Global Illumination and render prepass: Improved prepass sample distribution. Option to supersample the prepass (in render node settings). This takes more image samples in the prepass without increasing the total number of GI light samples. This provides a better coverage of GI on small parts or edges of objects and clouds, with a smaller increase in render times than a similar increase in GI relative detail. GI blur radius can be changed by the user (in render node settings). Some changes which may improve GI consistency in 3D Previews on the lowest detail levels, although these levels may be noticeably slower in some cases. Added windowed/marquee zooming to the network view, see Mouse and Key Settings for the bindings. Pressing the return/enter key when an object/shader is selected in the 3D Preview will open its param view. Added new object selection/centreing functionality. The 3D Preview reset camera position button now has a submenu for the "Centre on object or shader" item which lets you centre on the currently selected object as well as all other objects/shaders in the scene. The 3D Preview context menu has two new items, one of which does the same as just described and another which lets you select any object/shader in the scene. The "More Settings" tab in the render node param view has been renamed "Extra". Mac only: Fixed a problem with undo in edit text fields. Mac only: Fixed a problem with the render node param view tabs, where the tab buttons had become wider than the control and param view. The Errors and Warnings dialog now displays its list items much more quickly. Set Look At Point and Pick Focus Point are working again in the 3D Preview. Errors and Warnings now only displays a maximum of 250 errors and 250 warnings. It also only updates a few times a second instead of constantly. New Notifier function node ( Functions/Debug/Notifier ), intended to help debug node networks. Navigation panel in 3D Preview is now opaque to clicks and mouse movement, aside from dragging. Fixed a bug where using the context menu in the 3D Preview could lead to it not having full interactivity subsequently. Improved drawing of node connections across multiple views when connecting and disconnecting. Fixed some interaction problems between dragging the crop region and objects in the 3D preview. Two new command line options: -no3dpreview: Do not open the 3D Preview automatically. -nonetworkview: Do not open the Network View automatically (except in Node Network Layout). Windows only: The program folder contains a batch file called tgdNo3DPreviewNoNetworkView.bat which launches Terragen with the -no3dpreview and -nonetworkview command line options. LWOMicroExporter now supports %04d to insert frame number. Changes to Update Checker: Automatic update notification dialog only shows once per day. The update notification dialogs have a new button labeled "Ignore New Version" which causes Terragen to ignore notification of that particular update in future. Note that if you ignore a version it will also be ignored if you use Check for Updates or Check For Updates Now. You can clear the ignored versions in Preferences -> Software Update, allowing Terragen to notify you of these updates. A "Check for Updates" item has been added to the Help menu. Some aesthetic changes to node network rendering which may make it look a little cleaner, especially when zoomed out. ------------------------ Build 1.9.88.1 (public alpha) This is an "unstable" build. The renderer is known to occasionally suffer from errors and may fail to complete successfully. Most of these problems are likely to be caused by the changes we have made for multi-threading or by the renovated ray-tracing engine. There may also be inconsistencies with cloud lighting and possibly global illumination generally. We do not recommend using this build for final production rendering. Instead please use our last stable build: 1.9.04.1. There are, however a large number of new features and bug fixes which you may find beneficial, so please read on... Summary: The renderer is now parallelized to take advantage of multiple cores or processors. There are still some stability issues with multi-threaded rendering. You should not make any changes to a project while a render is in progress as this can have unpredictable results, some causing Terragen to crash. (In previous builds a change to the project might affect the rendered result but was a legitimate way to test changes to some parameters.) The ray-tracing engine has been renovated to improve accuracy and stability and to make it more efficient at high resolutions. The Water Shader can now render transparency with depth-based light absorption and volumetric lighting under the surface. Unified Atmosphere Integration. This fixes rendering problems at the horizon, intersections between multiple cloud layers and intersections between clouds and terrain. GI cache lookup is now much faster. This improves the speed of the final pass in scenes that use the Enviro Light and have high depth complexity (e.g. with vegetation). Cloud Layer V2 properly occludes bright background objects such as the sun 3D Previews and shader/node previews can now be opened in separate windows. They can be opened in various ways from different parts of the interface; see the complete changes log below. New 3D Preview Navigation panel, either embedded in previews or opened in separate window from the View menu. You need to focus a preview to control it with the navigation panel in a separate window. Added ability to change cameras in previews, including using preset cameras and camera nodes not attached to render nodes. Many other user interface enhancements and bug fixed. See the complete changes log below. Complete changes log and multi-threading guidelines: The renderer is now parallelized to take advantage of multiple cores or processors. It determines the number of available logical processors on the host computer and renders that many buckets/tiles synchronously. You can prevent this from happening or limit the number of buckets to be rendered synchronously by changing the "maximum threads" setting in the Render node settings. The default maximum is 16, but the renderer should never try to render more buckets in synch than there are logical processors. If the maximum is set to 0, bucket rendering will take place in the application's main thread rather than a separate thread, which may be useful for debugging purposes, but should render in a similar time as with 1. If Terragen is failing to detect the correct number of cores on your computer (shown on the About box), you can increase the "minimum threads" parameter in the Render node settings. However, Terragen will never exceed "maximum threads" even if minimum is higher. The GUI also responds more quickly during multi-threaded rendering. There are still some stability issues with multi-threaded rendering. You should not make any changes to a project while a render is in progress as this can have unpredictable results, some causing Terragen to crash. (In previous builds a change to the project might affect the rendered result but was a legitimate way to test changes to some parameters.) The ray-tracing engine has been renovated to improve accuracy and stability and to make it more efficient at high resolutions. This potentially affects ray-traced shadows, reflections, transparency, GI pre-pass and GI surface details. There are some situations where the new renderer is slower, but it should show improved stability and speed at high resolutions/detail levels. Some unwanted rendering artefacts have been reduced or eliminated entirely. There may be room for future optimisations. The Water Shader can now render transparency with depth-based light absorption and volumetric lighting under the surface, as long as the camera is above the water. The colour and density of the volumetric lighting can be modulated using shaders or functions. Other ray-tracing bugs have been fixed: Scaling and rotation of populated (instanced) objects are now traced correctly. Fixed some depth/occlusion problems between non-subdivisible surfaces (e.g. imported objects) and subdivisible surfaces (e.g. planet). Reflections and GI rays are now able to see non-shadow-casting objects. Exceptions are the sun's disc and the visible sphere of light sources (their contributions should be handled by specular highlights). Disablement of smooth normals now works in ray tracing of non-subdivisible objects (e.g. imported objects). Fixed a major bug which was responsible for some crashes at the end of the pre pass and possibly elsewhere. If errors occur in a render thread, TG attempts to display an error and terminate the render safely rather than allow the thread to crash. This may not always work. Prevented a crash upon deleting a cloud layer or atmosphere (bug 59). Unified Atmosphere Integration. This fixes rendering problems at the horizon, intersections between multiple cloud layers and intersections between clouds and terrain. Note: In many scenes this change also has the side effect of reducing the number of atmosphere/cloud samples that are actually rendered, reducing quality but also reducing render times. Therefore you may need to increase settings when rendering old projects. GI cache lookup is now much faster. This improves the speed of the final pass in scenes that use the Enviro Light and have high depth complexity (e.g. with vegetation). Some other changes to GI light cache and cloud layer acceleration cache. Cloud Layer V2 properly occludes bright background objects such as the sun (cloud opacity threshold depends on background luminance). Improved memory handling in atmospheres and clouds, which may improve stability and speed. Buckets/tiles are evenly sized throughout a render or cropped render. Disabled unique variations in populator because it has not been properly implemented yet. Removed a potential delay of up to one second after the completion of each bucket (tile) in a render. Fixed a bug which would cause invisible (transparent) parts of surfaces to become visible in dense atmosphere. The Shader Preview for atmospheres now only shows the individual atmosphere shader without showing all other input atmospheres. Made some corrections to win_command_line.txt and mac_command_line.txt. Added new 3D Preview Navigation panel. Open from the the View menu. You need to focus a preview to control it with the navigation panel. You can set the movement step sizes used for the slowest navigation speed in the Navigation Panel preferences. The Navigation Panel is also available "embedded" in previews that support navigation. You can toggle it on or off. You can choose whether it is shown or not in the Navigation Panel preferences. Library and Content preferences panel now responds to the Reset Panel button. New custom list implementation on Windows. It shouldn't suffer from the previous drawing problems, such as flicker or disappearing items. Drag and drop is not yet supported. As this is the first release with the new lists, please report any problems you come across. Reduced the frequency of crashes when opening projects. It may still happen, but it should happen much less often. Objects in the 3D Preview now show their name and node type in tooltips when you mouse over them. Added ability to change cameras in previews, including using preset cameras and camera nodes not attached to render nodes. Windows only: Improved drawing of text only lists. 3D Preview Location window now also displays camera position. Fixed a problem where the 3D Preview would appear stretched or be shown too large and have the top and bottom clipped by the edges of the view. This was particularly apparent on the Mac when using 3D Previews in separate windows, but was also occasionally a problem on Windows. You can now group nodes by selecting them and using Group from the Edit menu (see menu for key shortcut). 3D Previews and shader/node previews can now be opened in separate windows. To open the shader/node preview, right click on the small shader/node preview on the left side of the main window. There is also a button on the parameter views for shaders and heightfields which opens a new shader preview window. Shader/node previews in separate windows now have much the same controls as 3D Previews. Added a Focus Point button to the preview controls. Changed Set Camera button to have an icon rather than text. Added Reset Camera button to the preview controls. Previews in separate windows display which camera they're using on their tab. Render window now shows finished renders at full size on completion. Added a context menu to the Render window which has zoom related items on it. Tooltips in network view display name and type on nodes under the mouse on all Windows versions except Vista (still bugs to be fixed there). Many menus, for example the node selection menus, are now sorted in alphabetical order, to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Mouse wheel zooming now works in 3D Preview and heightfield/shader previews. Parameters with "color" in their names are renamed to use "colour" in most, if not all, non-deprecated nodes. Old projects and clip files will load without problems. Improved navigation speed when camera is less than 500 metres above the terrain: when very close to the terrain the speed is no longer reduced as much as in previous versions. Drag-and-drop rearrangement of items in the node lists for terrain and shaders. Currently there is the risk of making circular links and causing a crash (as with the Move Up/Down buttons). It may also be slow when you have a lot of nodes. The crop region is now drag resizable in the 3D Preview. Various new items added to various old and new context menus. You can use drag/marquee selection to select nodes in the network view. View windows have new tabstrip controls. You can tab between panels in View windows, much as you would in a browser. See the Mouse and Key Settings dialog for the keys. The content path preferences are now hooked into the back end in some cases. Addition of Window menu, which allows you select any currently open non-floating window and bring it forward. Added new Rendering preferences panel. This allows you to choose a notification method on rendering completion, as well as to suppress the screen saver or system sleep during rendering. Mac only: When you open a TGD file from the Finder you are now prompted to save changes to the currently opened project if need be. In reality, you will probably get prompted to do this every time you open a file, until TG2's change tracking gets a bit better. Mac only: Fixed a problem where clicking on the minimise/restore button of the network view when it was maximised would show the 3D preview again, but the 3D preview would then be maximised and hide the network view. This should now work as expected. The 3D Preview and the Network View have close, maximize and minimize buttons. Fixed a problem where grouped nodes were no longer part of their groups when a new network window was opened (bug 58). Fixed a problem with menus being leaked. This very probably has been causing the problems on Windows with the UI locking up, and odd flashing etc. The same leak was occurring on OS X, but it does not cause the same sorts of problems. Fixed a bug that was causing problems with the "check for updates" dialog, which could potentially effect both Windows and Mac versions (bug 55). Mac only: Change the way text renders on the Mac in the OpenGL previews to use the lower quality but quicker method, which should improve interaction speeds particularly with complex networks. New functions: Bias Scalar, Gain Scalar, Smooth Step Scalar, Hard Step Scalar (replaces Step Scalar). Degrees to Radians and Radians to Degrees Step Scalar is removed from the functions menu because its parameterisation and behaviour are inconsistent with other functions. Hard Step Scalar should be used instead. Existing projects that use Step Scalar will continue to work. Errors and Warnings notification area at bottom right of main window now dynamically resizes. Windows only: Improved Errors & Warnings window layout. Windows only: Fixed a problem with text measurement in message boxes which caused them to sometimes be too wide with a lot of extra space between the right extreme of the text and the right window border. If application is quit or the main window is closed quit during rendering, Terragen asks before stopping the render. Command line -ox flag now works The notification that a license key file has been copied for safekeeping is not displayed if the -hide or -exit flags are used on the command line. Windows only: Made some improvements to the command line parsing in tgd.exe (tgdcli.exe was OK). Corrected problems relating to objects' heading/elevation/distance parameters when loading from projects or clips. They no longer introduce unwanted non-integer position values (eg. very small non-zero values were seen on the planet position). Default project: Background no longer casts shadows (used to be needed for correct ray tracing). Cleaned up the planet's position values. default.xml does not specify output filename or extra output filename, allowing platform-specific filenames to be chosen at runtime. Reduced default haze density to 1.5 (was 4) and increased default haze exp height to 3000 (was 2000). ------------------------ Build 1.9.04.1 (release) Populator V3: Fixed some problems with surface normals. Automatically repopulates if a parameter has changed in the object (sometimes this is necessary to avoid rendering errors). ------------------------ Build 1.9.03.1 (release) Windows only: Improved performance on SSE3-capable processors. Smooth object rendering: surface normals are read from OBJ and TGO files and interpolated to give smooth shading if this option is checked in the OBJ or TGO Reader. The similar option in the LWO Reader is currently not functioning as no normals are read from the file (this will be addressed in future). Slightly reduced memory requirements for objects. Sunlight and Light source have optional soft shadows. Not yet optimised for speed. Compute Normal, Compute Terrain and Terrain Set now give more correct results across the whole globe. (This will affect the appearance of many shaders.) Default patch size of Compute Terrain is now 20 (was 10). All 'Constant' and 'Get' functions pass through input data if they are disabled. Rearranged subcategories for shaders. Changed the "Add Terrain" button to use Displacement Shaders instead of all Surface Shaders. Three new Function nodes added, in the Boolean group: Boolean NOT Scalar Scalar to Boolean Scalar Conditional Boolean Scalar If -exit or -hide flags are specified on the command line, TG2 does not ask you if you want to upgrade to a new version. Changed the way project/scene errors and warnings are handled. They now go to an Errors and Warnings window. The current number of errors and warnings are shown at the bottom right of the main window. Clicking in that area will open the Errors and Warnings window. If there are new errors/warnings the icons will pulse, until you bring forward or close the Errors and Warnings window. You can now open multiple network views. New ones can be opened from the View menu. You can zoom the network view using the mouse wheel. Internal networks now shown in the network view which last had the keyboard focus. This lets you choose which network view internal networks are shown in when you click the Internal Network button of a param view, or similar. When you use the "Up Level" bookmark in network views, the network view will zoom and centre on the node you were previously inside. Network view bookmarks are now ordered alphabetically. Network background/connection line colours are now configurable through the Network view preferences pane. Project files are released by the application when it has finished opening them. Added "Open Recent" File menu items for project and clip files. Added some new icons for the Mac version. One render node can be given "master" status, so that renderer will be used when rendering from the command line. Improved the layout of Render Sequence button and parameters. Upgraded render view which allows manipulations like scrolling, panning and zooming. See the Mouse and Key Settings dialog (Help menu) for controls. Key in Mouse and Key Settings dialog now open by default. Various objects no longer show b-box in preview if they are disabled. Fixed two bugs in 3D Preview navigation: Fixed a bug that would prevent movement of the view when it was positioned at 0,0,0 or close to the focus point. Faster movement is possible when the view is very close to the planet's surface. Fixed a bug that would cause a crash when using 3D Preview keyboard shortcuts after Opening or Newing a project. Fixed some problems with heightfield operator execution: they would restart execution when certain actions occurred in the 3D Preview. Some check boxes changed to radio buttons in Heightfield From Shader, Heightfield Generate, Image Map Shader and Camera. Improved progress dialogs. Made some changes to list related code, so that node lists (top left list) are better at retaining selected/expanded etc. states when things are done like reordering lists, changing node names or deleting nodes. There are still some problems, but please report any issues you have with as much detail as possible. The ideal should be that the overall "layout" of the list shouldn't change unless you change it, so please report anything which seems odd. Default Shader has options to unpremultiply the colour, translucency and luminosity images. All other images are not unpremultiplied. Mac only: Nodes in the Network View have tooltips, displaying the name and type of the node. (This will be added to Windows version when we have fixed some problems on Vista.) Prevented a crash that would occur with some shader networks while rendering shadows. Fixed a rendering problem with small values for "Exp height" in the atmosphere. No longer crashes if a project is loaded with renderer that references an invalid camera. Mac only: Added an icon for TGC files. Mac only: Fixed a problem where node lists ( top left lists in main window ) weren't having their text updated when you changed the name of a node. Windows only: Fixed window resizing bug when using the Show/Hide Desktop command (Windows-D shortcut). Windows only: Fixed window resizing bugs when using WindowBlinds. Windows only: Possibly fixed "unknown filter" bug for ".tiff" extensions. Fixed tab switch focus bug on Windows. Windows only: Changed the way window destruction is handled. This is to fix a bug where closing a network window with param floaters open would then prevent those nodes from being able to show their param floaters again. Windows only: Found and stopped some GDI object leaks. This may resolve the problems with TG2 freezing up/buttons not drawing after extended usage. Fixed a display problem with Preferences list and panels. This may also fix problems elsewhere in the user interface. Fixed a bug with "GI surface details" in combination with Ambient Occlusion. Slightly reduced the probability of erratic bright spots in Global Illumination or Ambient Occlusion. Fixed a bug in the ray tracer that was rendering many surfaces incorrectly in reflections and GI sampling. Fixed an error in the ray tracer that would sometimes cause incorrect colours to be generated by shaders that have luminosity. This bug had far-reaching consequences, especially for Global Illumination (it was probably responsible for many of the red patches in images). Some changes to specular reflections and glow effects in atmosphere in order to reduce the occurrence of unwanted GI hot spots. Increased the dimensions of the irradiance cache's bounding box, which fixes a GI problem at planetary scales. The GI pre-pass does less unnecessary work when the Enviro Light's "strength in atmosphere" is 0. Some other minor optimisations similar to this. The internal depth buffer is now rendered more accurately (depth is interpolated across microtriangles), which minimises the artefacts that were previously seen on shorelines and other intersecting objects/surfaces. Water Shader: Now renders identically each time a particular project is loaded (fixed a bug in the seeding). Planet Atmosphere: Reverted some changes that increased render times in build 1.8.76.0. Cloud Layer V2: Reverted some changes that increased render times in build 1.8.76.0. "Wispy base" and "Softer base" are now adjustable scalars "Base wispiness" and "Base softness". Changes to Cloud Layer V2's acceleration cache, including: Has more options to control acceleration vs. quality. No longer applies to visible samples, to eliminate visible artifacts. Power Fractal V3: Safely handles very small or negative values for smallest scale. Number of octaves is limited to 40 for speed. Alpine Fractal: Changed defaults. Safely handles small values for smallest scale. Number of octaves is limited for safety and speed (exact number depends on lead-in octaves). Surface Layer: Changes, improvements and new options for the "Intersect Underlying" feature. Fuzzy Zone Softness has now moved to the Coverage and Breakup tab. MOLAMapShader: No longer attempts to load images if the user-specified filename is empty. Hid some redundant parameters. ----------------- Build 1.8.76.0 (release) "Abort" renamed "Stop" on RenderView and in message boxes. "Do you want to stop rendering?" message boxes have "Continue Rendering" as the default. Rearranged order of some message box buttons. ----------------- Build 1.8.75.0 (alpha) OBJ Reader: Negative vertex and texture indices are correctly interpreted as relative indices, not absolute indices. (This allows us to use some objects that would crash in earlier versions.) "g" and "o" increment material indices if there are no deliberate material assignments in the object. "Check for Updates" feature. Can be enabled/disabled from Preferences. Cloud Layer V2: Removed some severe blockiness when using acceleration cache. Change to the way density shaders are looked up; more shaders will now work as expected, eg. Distance Shader Clouds and atmosphere: Internal change to give them higher quality GI/envirolight sampling (this may increase pre-pass render time but results should be better for any given settings). Fixed some inconsistencies and crashes with the Objects Node List. Addressed some other GUI problems. (Deep version only) A warning is displayed if no license key can be found. ----------------- Build 1.8.72.0 (alpha) OBJ Reader: material indices are set up for objects that have no defined materials (eg. no .mtl file) (allows user to manually set up shaders with the Multi Shader) Fixed a number of problems in the renderer in order to improve stability. (Windows only) Improved behaviour of tab controls on XP Classic Theme Fixed a minor bug with positioning of floating parameter windows. ----------------- Build 1.8.71.0 (alpha) Fixed TGO and OBJ material handling that was broken in v1.8.69.0 Fixed a crash that could happen when closing the program or loading a new project. ----------------- Build 1.8.69.0 (alpha) Fixed an infinite recursion crash when Heightfield Shader is used as a blendshader. Command line arguments are ignored by the free edition. ".tiff" is a valid extension for TIFF images (not just ".tif") Some code changes to String class that may improve stability, although it is unlikely. ----------------- Build 1.8.68.0 (alpha) Can save .tif images. OBJ Reader: renders ok with objects that are loaded with no materials. TGO Reader: renders ok with objects that are loaded with no materials. Water Shader: renders the same each time the project is loaded. Can be changed with a seed parameter. Changed GUI text to say that the default inputs preset is "Universal". About box is shown before main window is opened (to avoid problems with error messages during project load). Some quick timer problems fixed. Some list drawing problems possibly fixed. In Preferences the user can choose which project file is loaded at startup or File -> New. On the Mac, the second command line argument is never interpreted as the name of a project file. Render node: default output paths start with "/" on the Mac. Node network help displays keys from the inputs preferences (although this is still not hooked up yet). Command line arguments are working again. Command line rendering is possible. Some other changes that may improve stability. ----------------- Build 1.8.64.0 (public) Lake: Fixed a water level problem. Reflective Shader: transparency parameter removed. Water Shader: Transparency parameter removed. Changed wave defaults. Fixed some key file problems. Fixed a problem that sometimes occurred when saving files (disabled "safe saving"). "Fix holes" parameter is invisible in the GUI and is ignored in files. It is always on. ----------------- Build 1.8.62.0 (alpha) Various animation capabilities are disabled for the appropriate editions. In the free edition the following limitations apply: Image size is restricted to a maximum of 800x600. Detail is restricted to a max of 1. Anti-aliasing is restricted to a max of 3. Only allows up to 3 populators to be enabled for rendering. The renderer informs the user if it has to disable any. Changes to About box to display the edition. Water Shader. Lake object. Prefs for content paths (not currently used). A number of presets are available for the 3D Preview mouse and key settings. "Revert to saved" feature in File menu. Objects readers (and some generators) have a new "population mode" parameter. If set to "Member of a Population", object is only added to populations and is not rendered directly. Newly-created Populations are given a name based on the name of the object. Populator V3: "Populate Now" button replaces "Populate". New "planet" parameter. Uses this to accommodate planet position and curvature. New "seed" parameter to change all the random effects applied to instances. New "repopulate every frame" parameter which is off by default. If "repopulate every frame" is on, it repopulates whenever a frame is rendered (including stills). Otherwise, it will only repopulate if it has not been populated since load time or if a relevant parameter has changed in the Populator. "Terrain shader" and "planet" parameters default to "Compute Terrain" and "Planet 01" when populator is first created. When an object is linked to the Populator, the object's "population mode" is set to "Member of a Population". When reporting stats to the console, the name of the Populator is included. Reduced report frequency when inserting instances, which makes this phase much faster. Reports the total number of triangles inserted into the scene, reported in billions of triangles. Cloud Layer V2: Removed "sample smoothing" parameter. Changed an internal quality setting to make the GI pre pass faster. Planet Atmosphere: Default "haze exp height" is now 2000 (was 3000). Changed an internal quality setting to make the GI pre pass faster. default.xml: new Water group. Changes to some node and group positions and sizes. "Bake Animation Curves" moved to a new Project menu. The Water node list displays objects that are water related (eg. Lake), and they don't appear in the Objects node list. Terrain Set and Shader Set are hidden classes (not available in menus). Fixed a crash that could happen if a node was deleted from the network view while not being displayed in the current node list.