Number of Samples is a parameter that can be found in the settings of Cloud Layers and Atmospheres, located in the Atmosphere tab. It changes the quality of the clouds and atmosphere respectively by reducing random noise.

But how are Samples involved in atmosphere rendering? more…

Near Clip Distance is the distance from the camera*, where TG2 starts rendering the Preview. TG2 lets us change the Near Clip Distance to prevent display errors. What that means is best explained using an example. more…

A little tip on the side…

Via Image Map Shader, you can load any texture fairly easily and use it as displacement to make a terrain out of it.

There is an easier way to do it, however! You can also load images with the Heightfield Load operator. When you add a terrain with Add Terrain > Heightfield (load file), the list allows .ter terrains, as well as .bmp and .tga bitmaps.

Be sure to know that the last selection in the list, “*.*”, shouldn’t be overlooked. If you choose this, you can load any file. Of course it makes little sense to load just any data, like an application. Images however, work perfectly. TG2 recognizes all the formats that it accepts for Image Maps. Some of those are .jpg/.jpeg and .png.

If Heightfield Load is used instead of Image Map, some shaders and a lot of tricky Projection and Displacement settings can be avoided!

Group: Capture Nodes is a relatively unknown function, but it would come in handy for a lot of users.

Here’s a problem: you have built a complex surface with a lot of nodes, and now you want to move it around a bit in the network, so you have more space for other groups or new nodes. That’s not so easy. If you try to move the group, a lot of nodes just stay where they are. more…

In my personal experience it’s often the case that a bush or tree is simply not dense enough. A tree trough which you can easily see is sometimes just inappropriate. To the right is an example.

This How-To shows a simple trick to give single objects a much denser structure.

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As if it’s not frustrating enough that there aren’t a lot of free objects on the internet, a lot of them aren’t compatible with TG2 either. Often textures don’t load for example. However, this problem can be easily fixed! How it’s done is shown here with the use of the French Maple tree (Montpelier Maple, Acer monspessulanum) from the website of the TU Dresden. more…

If you’ve ever tried to stretch an imported terrain, i.e. a heightfield, over the whole planet like in TG0.9, you’ve probably run into some problems because heightfields don’t follow the curvature of the planet. more…

TG2 can do rather a lot, but some things are a long time coming. Among them is transparent water and, of course, water flowing downwards. I set about looking for a plausible simulation.

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If you have ever tried to scatter Fake Stones by means of Slope, you may have realised that it comes with quite an amount of secondary effects attached that are sometimes hard to deal with. The aim of this tutorial is, therefore, to present a method with only two Shaders that – nonetheless – provides immaculate results. more…

A substantial problem with populations is their resource requirement. Having several populations in a scene often requires hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of memory.

Before Vista was released in 2007, the typical PC had been equipped with relatively little memory. But you don’t get very far with 512MB. Furthermore, the population process can take quite some time.
So, what do populations have to be like if you want them to be generated fast and economically? more…