Say what you will, for the amount of realism Terragen could come up with, the piece of software was severely limited. You couldn't import anything, that was the main problem.

Anyway, Terragen 2 is almost out and there's a free technology preview for those interested.. I downloaded it and played with the interface a bit to discover that despite its logic and somewhat straightforwardness, it's clearly designed by engineers and not by graphic artists. I mean Hesus, are these the same people that made the Blender GUI? It's complicated, trees and subtrees, painful learning curve, and that's just by staring at it for 5 minutes... T1 was dead easy in that everything had a logical, mostly graphical step-by-stepper. Terrain. Atmosphere. Water. Light. Render.  T2 has those same ones, GI, a lot of goodies, but with every one of these previous headings comes a weird and contorted number of subheadings that give off the impression you're coding something instead of making art.

So blah!

huggles his copies of Bryce 6 and Carrara

drac

dropped into planetside site..and i found this paragraph..

"*Please note that the Technology Preview release is aimed mainly at high 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.

"We are very aware that many users may find the node based interface unfamiliar. We strongly emphasise that the Technology Preview release is aimed at high end users. We are continuing to develop the user interface to reduce the learning curve and make it easier to leverage the power of the TG2 render engine to create scenes of outstanding realism and complexity."

there is your answer....

I'm not a high end user but I'm enjoying playing with TG2.So what if it takes a high learning curve-it is at least free to play with.There is plenty of documents to peruse at the NEW planetside forums and loads of folk are freely giving their new TG2 files away so we lesser mortals can learn HOW to do things.There should be plenty of stuff to keep one occupied for years..

by the way I too love Bryce 6 and Daz Studio.Still struggling with Poser 6.,Hexagon2,Shade 7.

I felt the UI for TG2 wasn't too bad. I do coding all the time, so maybe that helped.

I agree with your assesment of TG2. T1 was pretty straightforward too. I played with it a bit but I need to work on learning other apps ones I paid good money for so T2 will have to wait.

I'm on Death_at_Midight's side of the fence on this one. I have found it pretty easy to get around in T2. It sure does munch away at the RAM though.

Importing .obj models is cumbersome, to say the least, at this point, but I think the nodes are not all that bad, and importing models is said to be made easier as time goes on. I have found in the last seven years that Matt is usually good to his word. I would expect this program to get better and more user-friendly as time goes by.

I remember spending hours learning T1 when it was first out and having to spend a lot of tim having to relearn later releases with a new approach to texturing terrains. However, T2 gets cooler results than the old Terragen, and I just haven't thought it was difficult at all.

That said, I also think Blender is ridiculous, so I have to agree with Drac there.

Personally I find it a lovely thought that I get to use all kindsa cool graph systems... I'm actually quite crossing my fingers to get that kinda powerfull tools in bryce some time...

waits for bryster to step forth and yield his comfy chair