Quote - Yes the photorealisitc touch is what I'm missing in Vue. I really don't know how TerraGen ( 2 ) does it but it just looks more realistic from color. I hope that's just an up-to-the-artist thing when it comes to Vue. I see many sceneic pictures in the Vue gallery and most of them look good but the colors are anything but realistic.

To me the colors of the images below look very realistic.

Quote - In all respects of TerraPak and it's content, if there's a little secret on how to make the textures look more crisp and sharp even on distance, I think that should be public and freeware!

There is no one secret or 'magic button' which makes textures look better. There are a number of different techniques in TerraPak which are used to create a more realistic set of textures. Everyone has their own techniques on how to help create the illusion of reality. TG and TG2 keep their textures crisp by using a low-level of AA on their images, so they don't effectively anti-alias the textures, only the edges of objects. Which is why I'm not too fond of how scenes with many plants look like in TG2, as there's typically lots of noise in the plant textures.

Quote - Simple TG2 picture? http://lucbianco.free.fr/2bgal/img/T2_2007/TGD602.jpg

Exactly my point. The plants in that image are too similar in look and color, and too noisy. Plus, IMO,  the rocks are very weird. Last I heard, TG2 didn't support GI or AO or Radiosity, so they will certainly not be able to keep up with Vue when it comes to close-ups like that image.

Also, last I heard, TG2 couldn't render transparent water (like in the sailboat picture above), which is pretty much a deal killer for many of us.

Quote - I think Vue can definatly stand tall against TerraGen1 but Terragen2 ...

I beg to differ, but of course everyone's entitled to their opinion. TG2 and TG both have excellent atmospheric models and both are great at rendering scenes which have 'no apparent scale'. But as soon as you throw objects like plants in the scene, their lack of good AA and a decent lighting model (GI/GA/Radiosity) become a bit of an issue with me.

I do think they have a superb cloud model. Some of the clouds Terragen can create are stunning.

Quote - Has anyone of you guys made TerraGen challenging closeup groundtextures?

My grass texture in TerraPak was created by dissecting carefully the fractals used in TG's superb grass ground texture. It took awhile to match the fractals, because TG uses a different fractal than the one's available in Vue.