Terragen™ 2

Terragen™ 2 Technology Preview

Terragen™ 2 Technology Preview will be the first public release of Planetside Software's new landscape visualisation software. The Technology Preview is planned to be made available in 2006 for both Windows and Mac OS X 10.4.x.

TG2 Technology Preview features an advanced hybrid micropolygon renderer with powerful multi-angle displacement capabilities. It has a versatile procedural engine that can be utilised to apply subpixel-level detail to many aspects of a scene. TG2 is capable of rendering billions of polygons.

TG2 can work with procedural terrains, heightfield based terrains or a combination of the two. Heightfield based terrains greatly benefit from added procedural detail. Terrain files from Terragen v0.9 are supported directly in TG2. The Technology Preview has an importer for MOLA data and more DEM formats will be added prior to release. TG2 is capable of rendering entire planets.


Procedural Terrain		Heightfield (DEM) Terrain

TG2 has a global atmosphere system which expands on the unsurpassed realism of the TG v0.9 atmosphere system. TG2 features multiple cloud layers, which can utilise 3D volumetric clouds or 2D clouds. Celestial bodies such as moons can be added to scenes, and multiple suns can be used.


Volumetric Clouds		Celestial Body

TG2 features a realtime 3D preview which refines the detail displayed over time. The preview can be used to position the camera and scene elements. It provides an accurate preview of the landscape, texturing, atmosphere and other objects.

TG2 Technology Preview supports vegetation, using 3D models from a variety of sources, including XfrogPlants models from greenworks/xfrog, inc. A Populator system allows you to easily place millions of instances of plant models in a scene, with variations such as rotation and scale to vary their appearance. The Populator can also be used with other arbitrary 3D objects imported from supported file formats.


Vegetation

The Technology Preview release is aimed mainly at higher end users. It has a powerful and flexible graphical node/graph editor which is used for creating networks of shaders and scene elements. The Technology Preview features a number of high level shaders which create more complex scene elements, such as clouds or rocks, as well as a low level function node system which allows you to create shaders from "first principles", using functions and methods that will be familiar to shader writers. The node editor can be used to unlock the full power of the TG2 rendering engine.

Function Node Network

We are very aware that many users may find the node based interface hard to understand and work with. We strongly emphasise that the Technology Preview release is aimed at higher end users. We will be developing a Standard version of TG2 for more casual users that has an interface similar to Terragen v0.9, but which makes it easier to leverage the power of the TG2 render engine to create scenes of outstanding realism and complexity. We do not currently have a timeline for the Standard version release, but more information will be released as it becomes available.

The Technology Preview is not beta software. Although it will exhibit some of the basic capabilities of TG2, it does not contain the full set of features that will exist in the final Terragen 2 release. Considerable development is underway that will not be reflected in the Technology Preview release. Most importantly the Technology Preview has not yet been optimised for speed and consequently rendering times will not be optimal. As development progresses we will be putting considerable effort into optimising the renderer, including making it threaded to best take advantage of multicore/multiprocessor machines.

TG2 Technology Preview will be available for everyone to download, but will require joining a mailing list to gain access to the download. It will be free for personal non-commercial use¹. Licenses for commercial use will be available for purchase. More details will be available closer to release.

You can find more information about Terragen 2/TGD here.

1 : Future versions including the release version may not be available under these terms. The free Technology Preview may be subject to additional time and feature restrictions.