and finally, the new prices have been announced. The current prices will be valid till 30 days from today on. From then, Deep and Deep Animation will cost $100 more. That is $299 for the Deep version and $399 for the animation version.  Further information can be found in the forum: 
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5978.msg65130#msg65130

TG2 Animation alone costs $299, so you essentially get models of 440 different species for $400. A pretty good price. If you buy the plants through Greenworks’ online shop, you will only get about 54 species for the same money!

If you already own TG2, you will get a discount “equivalent to their original purchase price.”

Source: http://www.xfrogdownloads.com/greenwebNew/news/Terragen2_XfrogPlants_EarthDay.html

Matt announced the final release of Terragen 2 will be released be this march. He also made clear that the deadline for pre-purchasing TG2 will be announced beforehand so that everybody who want’s to get a copy at the lower pre-purchase price will be able to do so.

The release will contain mostly bug fixes plus some new features like

• incremental saving
• a tool to measure distances
• camerapaths will be visible in the preview
• there will be a way to copy/paste coordinates, height and other properties of the terrain

However.. Planetside has been very bad at announcing release dates. A final release has been announced several times in the past and nothing ever happened. So we’ll have to wait and see whether or not something happens in the next two weeks.

For something different: It has been quite in this blog lately, but I’ll make up for it sometime. I was going to write “soon” but I didn’t want to make promises But if everything works out, I’m sure you’ll find it interesting and useful.

But how are Samples involved in atmosphere rendering?

A cloud is basically made up of billions of small water drops – to simulate these and the rays of light that hit and pass through them in a physically correct way would be a challenge for a supercomputer. To render an image we luckily don’t need physical correctness – clouds are simulated only as detailed as is required for a realistic appearance.

To render a cloud, the algorithm has to make a descision on whether the ray of light hits a particle/drop – and is either redirected or absorbed – or not. This decision is, to some extent, made randomly. This is no restriction, since raindrops in a cloud are randomly distributed anyway.

With this kind of random distributions you rarely get soft shapes though.
Let’s look at a similar “experiment”: Dice roll. The probability is equal for each side. Yet, after 12 throws, not every side will have shown an equal amount of times.

In the first diagram 12 throws are shown, the second shows another 1000. You can see that with more than 1000 throws the random results begin to form a predictable distribution.
Remember: The more samples, the better will the outcome approximate a certain value. More samples mean less random results.

In TG2 practice, that means less noise. You have to figure out, though, which part of the image is noisy. If it is the whole atmosphere, especially when creating sun rays, then the samples in Atmosphere 01 must be increased. If it’s only the clouds that are noisy, then you have to change the value in that particular Cloud-Layer.

Some examples:

1 Sample – The extreme example. It’s clearly visible that the clouds are made of only thousands of particles. So only one sample is clearly not enough. It doesn’t even fill up the clouds.

Additional render time for the clouds*: 1min 12s

8 Samples – That already looks good, but the edges still look a bit shredded, which is often unwanted.

Additional render time for the clouds*: 2min 41s

32 Samples – Any noise is gone. The render does take longer though, so you might want to go down to 16 samples on large images.

Additional render time for the clouds*: 8min 03s

In the last image we can see that the sky and rays in the bottom left corner still suffer from noise – this can be solved by increasing the sample count of Atmosphere 01. Most of the time you should first increase the sample count of the atmosphere, since it affects the entire atmosphere. If you only see noise in the clouds, then increase those samples.

More samples affect the rendertime greatly, under some circumstances you might have to employ a lot of samples and endure long hours of rendering to get a satisfactory result.

*Render time in addition to render time for the image without clouds.

You may already know the problem. You could be trying to render a small object up close, perhaps a grass clump – just to see if it even renders, or if the textures are imported correctly, etc. From farther above, all seems normal, but if you want to see a close-up of the object:

The problem also occurs when you come too close to the surface in general. The 3D constructs that TG2 uses to render the preview won’t show up when they are too close. The threshold that defines “too close” is the Near Clip Distance. Luckily that value is easy to increase (or decrease) using the shortcuts found in Help > Mouse and Key Settings. The preview has to be active for this to work. You can tell that it’s active by the dotted frame around the preview.

A quick tap on the ‘ [ ' key and the preview looks normal again:

However, the opposite effect is also helpful! When a planet looks like this, for instance:

... hitting ' ] ‘ a few times makes it look like this:

Why do we have to change the distance ourselves?

Graphics cards can’t handle infinite worlds, only parts of them. The problem: the piece that is handled in the preview is already at maximum size, covering everything starting just in front of the camera and reaching thousands of kilometers into space. To guarantee the best view, TG2 adjusts the near and far clipping distance so that the visible part is in fact in front of the camera and reaches as far as far as the graphics card can take it. Beyond that we get graphics errors, as with the planet in the example.

These kinds of errors can occur in the sky under normal circumstances as well. That’s often due to missing or old drivers. Or possibly it’s the graphics card that has reached its limits. That doesn’t mean, however that newer is always better.

*”Camera” doesn’t mean the Render camera, but the imaginary camera, that supplies the image for the Preview. Source: Planetside-Forum [1], [2].

For a start, I made a new header image replacing the boring default one. After having seen this painting by Tinga I’ve decided to try an iceberg with TG2 but make it more realistic than the TG2 icebergs I’ve seen lately. I think it came out pretty nice although it’s still far from being photo realistic.

I hope you like it!

Though well behind schedule, Planetside included some new features like an unlimited undo history, more anti-aliasing algorithms (including some sort of blooming) and the new painted shader. Fortunately, they all work and didn’t seem to introduce any new bugs. Plus they are really useful!

Especially the painted shader will come in handy in countless situations. Combined with the right nodes, you can paint holes into clouds to get rays pointing exactly to the place you want. You can draw populations, displacement, textures where you need them.

As usual, a number of known problems with the renderer and ui have been fixed, some improving perfomance a bit – but there are still several bugs to be fixed. A complete change list can be found in the Planetside Forum.

It seems a release this year might be possible.

The new Free Edition can be downloaded from the website. Instructions for owners of a standard or professional license as well as a change log can be found at the WM forums.

Have fun!

The new build contains multple bugfixes and changes to the surface and distribution shader. You can at last mask the surface shader with a blending shader of your choice without having to use the fractal breakup workaround. The distribution shader has options for altitude and slope key now.
The planet surface shader has been removed and will not be developed further in the future.

edit: The update is for pre-purchasers only, the announcement can be found over in the planetside forums.