Terragen™ 2 for Realistic Natural Environments

by Artvisualizer Press Media Thursday, May 07, 2009

Terragen™ 2 is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. Create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets and use Terragen 2 to create the most realistic visualisations possible. You control the weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons and stars. With Terragen 2 you have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micropolyon displacements, clouds and object distributions. You can reorganise the planetary shading pipeline to suit your goals. Place grass and trees wherever you want, as well as other objects in OBJ format that you can model in third party software. It's easy to find great plants and objects modelled by other Terragen users or elsewhere on the web.

Terragen is not a game engine; it has a sophisticated film- and broadcast-quality renderer and procedural modelling tools designed so that you can create the most realistic images possible without taking a photograph. Nor is it a general-purpose 3D program designed to render everything. We have dedicated more than a decade to specialising in algorithms that simulate skies, outdoor lighting, terrain textures, and to render extremely large and detailed terrains. Terragen 2 puts those algorithms in your control. When you need CG environments that don't look CG, Terragen 2 will help you get there. If you want to go beyond reality, Terragen 2 is a toolbox with infinite possibilities.

Terragen 2 makes this possible with the following features and benefits:

Hybrid micropolygon renderer optimised for large displacements and very large landscapes.
Render entire planets, sweeping vistas, tiny rock gardens, or anything in between.
Export high resolution objects from displaced surfaces.
Import 3D objects for rendering.
Render millions of plants and other objects using instancing. Billions of virtual polygons are handled with ease.
Add multiple heightfields, textures and displacement maps to your scene.
Georeferencing options; automatic georeferencing for properly formatted GeoTIFF files.
Procedural terrains that can span an entire planet.
Apply almost "infinite" fractal detail to terrain and other objects.
Overhanging terrain using procedural displacements, image-based displacements, or imported geometry.
3D painting of colours and masks that can control almost anything in the scene.
Photorealistic atmosphere and sunlight.
Volumetric clouds or fast "2.5D" clouds.
Global illumination, multiple scattering in volumetrics, full light interaction between volumetrics and surfaces.
Production quality anti-aliasing and motion blur that renders quickly and efficiently.
High dynamic range output; generate photorealistic environment maps and IBL sources.
Node graph editor for ultimate control over shaders and textures.
Flexible planetary shading pipeline.
Animation of almost any parameter with the optional Animation module.

Click to Take the Tour

Terragen 2 has been giving me incredible skies and environments for many years now. The team has taken an exponential leap in terms of photographic reality. I have done several projects with Terragen 2 where it has generated lighting and reflection HDRIs and those became the only light source in the 3D renders. With the ability to load georeferenced DEM data so easily and so accurately, guesswork is gone and you can concentrate totally on image fidelity. It's a piece of software I would not do without at this point. A serious primary asset in the tool belt.

Rob Nederhorst, VFX Supervisor - Radium / ReelFX Creative Studio

Terragen 2 Free Edition

Terragen 2 is available both as a free download and as a purchase option for Terragen 2 Deep Edition. The free version may only be used for non-commercial purposes and is limited in the following ways:

Render Size Maximum: 800x600
Render Detail Maximum: 1.0
Antialiasing Maximum: 3
Number of Rendered Populations: 3

You may purchase a commercial license which will remove these feature restrictions. Your license will cover the final release of Terragen 2 Deep Edition and any minor updates (2.x versions), not just the Beta. Please see our Terragen 2 purchase page for details on pricing and purchase options.

The Terragen 2 downloads on this page are for the free non-commercial edition. They may also be used by commercial users on a 30-day trial basis only.

System Requirements: