Terragen 2.2

Planetside Software, that's the company not the game, has released their latest terraforming software, Terragen 2.2. It's a world builder that lets you create vast realistic landscapes filled with picturesque mountains and clouds. I'll list the presser after the jump.

Here's the press release:

Terragen 2.2 Now Available

Planetside Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Terragen 2.2 which comprises a significant update to our flagship product. The release of Terragen 2.2 continues our policy of providing feature rich, free updates to purchasing customers of our 2.x product.

PLEASE NOTE: The Mac release is a Public Beta and may not be suitable for production use. The user interface has changed to use Cocoa and we want to test it with a large audience before making a final release. Please report any bugs or unusual behaviour you come across.

This release includes many significant new features that improve workflow, expand flexibility and power, and increase rendering speed for all users. Significant changes include:

• Optional wireframes in the 3D preview, with per-object/population controls
• New cloud control inputs (Altitude Offset, Depth Modulator, Final Density Modulator), allowing significantly greater cloud shape control and special effects like "clouds follow terrain"
• Cloud localization, allowing explicit controls for constraining cloud layers to a specific size and location, as well as click-and-drag repositioning on all axis; localized clouds are faster to render
• Raytraced atmosphere option, resulting in faster and lower noise atmosphere rendering in many cases
• Cloud shadow maps, offering an additional rendering speed boost for localized clouds
• Improved quality of soft shadows
• New option "anisotropic enviro light" in atmosphere and clouds allows more accurate light scattering simulation
• GI prepass padding (similar to ray detail region padding, but for GI samples), helps address issues with GI mismatch at crop and frame edge boundaries
• Bucket rendering controls for adjusting the size of rendering tiles, which can affect rendering speed and efficiency
• Light source falloff distance controls added
• Render viewer can show RGBA channels separately and alpha can be saved from render view
• Added Rule of Thirds composition guides to 3D Preview

Object Wireframes

• All imported objects can now be viewed as wireframes in the 3D Preview, allowing much easier composition of complex scenes.
• Object display mode can be controlled globally in the 3D Preview or per-object. The display mode options, shown above from left to right, are Wireframe, Bounding Box, and Hidden.

New Cloud Control Inputs

• The addition of the new Altitude Offset, Depth Modulator, and Final Density Modulator inputs to the Cloud Layer node allows powerful new methods of manipulating cloud shape and position by using the output of other nodes. You can now easily create effects like clouds following the terrain, as well as achieve even more realistic general cloud forms by combining multiple noise functions in different ways.

Cloud Localization

• The new Cloud Localization features make it easy to constrain cloud effects to specific parts of your scene. Multiple controls are provided for radius, depth, and position of a local cloud layer, as well as falloff for realistically soft edges. You can also use the standard object drag handles to easily reposition your clouds.
• In addition to the greater flexibility and ease of use cloud localization enables, there are also potential performance benefits. Localized cloud layers render faster than global cloud layers - even global layers with blend shaders to limit coverage - because they limit the area where cloud calculations are required. In scenes where you only want clouds in a particular area this can result in much faster rendering vs. old blend-shader methods. In the above example, an identical scene using an image map as a Blend Shader resulted in a render time almost twice as long as when Cloud Localization was used.

Raytraced Atmosphere

• The 2.2 release now includes the option to raytrace the atmosphere pass. This can result in significantly increased performance in many cases, particularly where heavy atmospheric shadows, rays, and other factors cause increased noise which normally demands very high atmospheric settings. With Raytrace Atmosphere the noise level of the scene is influenced by the antialiasing setting, so you can leave the atmosphere and cloud samples alone and simply increase antialiasing to reduce noise across your entire scene, and generally with a lower total render time for equivalent quality vs. non-raytracing.