Planetside Software has announced the open beta of v4 of its landscape creation and rendering software. New features in this version include: realtime ray-traced preview, realistic cloud shading model, lens effects, improved render times, etc. The current version runs on Windows, a Mac version will be available in early July. More on Terragen’s website.
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The new version has extraordinary clouds and now is very capable for doing landscapes or spherical environments for a compositing or a scene . That was a weak point in terragen and it has been much improved. You use both the previous preview system and the new raytraced because the old one in some cases seems more efficient for example when you move the sun on the viewport by moving the gizmo. Many prefer Terragen over Vue because Vue has a childish and clunky interface with tiny buttons instead of Terragen which is by default procedural and node based. Also the output is much more realistic and that was the reason for being used in the latest star wars and the Martian.
In my opinion, rendering good looking clouds was a weak point in Terragen 3. Fortunately now they have addressed this issue and the clouds are magnificent out of the box. This makes the software more capable for making simple or 360 distant landscape plates for compositing.