Quote - The short answer to your question (why the difference in quality) is that Terragen's quality comes at a price of very long render times.

Yep, Agiel, I do understand that point. But, I believe I can create a very close approximation to a 'Terragen' look using the right materials and the correct render settings. And that's what this 'excursion' is all about.

My guess is Terragen has a very sophisticated anti-aliasing routine which maintains the 'noise' in the texture, while still providing for an aliased look to the overall image. I'm trying different rendering settings to see how close I can get to that. The big problem is Vue's default aliasing schemes, pretty much kill any fine texture in a faraway object.

Another guess would be Terragen animations would 'snap,crackle and pop' all over the place because of this anti-aliasing. There are certainly trade-offs.