![]() It’s been used for at least 25 feature films (those are only the ones we know about), many more TV commercials, game trailers and cinematics, and recently VR projects. Most of the major VFX studios that I know of have licenses of Terragen, but the amount of usage varies. – On what kinds of projects do VFX studios use Terragen? (By the way I saw that Terragen was used on Serious Sam, I’m a huge fan!) Our GI caches are structured in a way that we can distribute rendering of GI caches for animations across render farms, and not have to hold up a single workstation to render the whole cache. We also combine the cache with some image-space detail enhancements so that the images have some of the rich details that you’d see in a brute force ray traced solution. Terragen uses an irradiance cache, of sorts. ![]() We’re now starting to focus on making Terragen more powerful as an asset generation tool, with high quality geometry and texture output so that you can take your environments into any other renderer you like, with whatever level of detail you can handle. The Terragen community is also a concentration of knowledge in the domain of landscape generation and environment building, and it’s rewarding to see people contributing more to it every day. The volumetric engine is quite fast and can render arbitrary procedural volumes, although its parameters and UI are biased towards clouds. Atmosphere and natural lighting play important roles, and Terragen excels at these things. But it’s not just about rendering of hard surfaces. These days there are renderers that can handle many millions of polygons quite easily, so in terms of pure rendering technology Terragen doesn’t have many clear advantages that it used to. It assumes that the input model is very low res – such as a plane or a parametric sphere – and then everything you do after that is displacement. Terragen 2 was designed to render huge displacements quickly. The more details you put into the model, the less displacement you need, but then you have a heavier model to work with in the viewport and heavier I/O. You could model a landscape in, say, Maya, and use a renderer like PRMan to dice it into micropolygons and add detail at render time with displacement, but even with PRMan it was very important to keep the displacement to a minimum if you wanted it to render fast. To keep the data manageable, you need to be careful about where to put those polygons in space, so that there is enough detail close to the camera and you’re not using any more than you need in the distance. To do this with polygons, for a 2k image you need millions of them. In the early 2000s, most renderers had a hard time dealing with the sheer detail that you need to render a realistic landscape. The situation today is quite different from what it used to be. – What is specific with landscapes, compared with other kinds of 3d models? What specific rendering algorithms implementations enable you to be competitive, for landscapes, against generalist renderers such as Vray, Mental Ray, Arnold… ? ![]() In the mid 90s these experiments started to coalesce into a single program I called ‘Terragen’, but since then it’s been rewritten from scratch at least twice. My interest in space exploration and the planets also played a big role. Some time during all this I developed a fascination with fractal landscape algorithms, and the further I went with them, the more I wanted to calculate realistic lighting and try to make photorealistic renders of them. I never finished anything because there were always too many ideas I wanted to try out. At the same time I was learning to program in AMOS and Blitz Basic, trying to make some simple games. When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time playing with graphics programs on the Amiga, and then I was introduced to a landscape generator called Vista. – First, how did the Terragen project start? Terragen was used in high-profile movies such as Oblivion, Superman, Hunger Games… We discussed with Matt about the current state of the art, what we can expect for the near future, and, last but not least, how it’s like to bring to market a cutting edge niche renderer. In our permanent quest to understand today’s rendering landscape, we decided to focus today on realistic landscapes rendering, and interviewed Matt Fairclough, founder of Planetside Software, the company behind Terragen, one of the reference softwares to generate and render realistic landscapes. (Interview performed in March 2015 for Seekscale company, a cloud rendering startup)
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