[iippo]: The new one is fantastic! :O

[Aradon Templar]: Glad you like it :) I found out how to use the strata overlay to get the stripes like that. They're not really supposed to go on mountains, but rather cliffsides. But they make my mountain appear more interesting than a hunk of greyish color :D

[iippo]: Some of the most interesting things in the world have been created by using the "wrong tool" for the job. :D

[Aradon Templar]: Heh, this page is even getting big. Must be taking ages for Silvie to load it :\ And yeah, interesting. Not exactly always the nicest things. Terragen can support this easily with all it's plugins to be abused.

[iippo]: I'm trying to make a cunning plan on how to evilly force you to do something for my Magnum Opus project... I can either follow my cunning evil plan, or you can come peacefully and co-operate. :P

[Aradon Templar]: XD I'm very intrigued by your cunning, evil plan of forcefulness and evillity, but on the other hand, I'm always glad to help with stuff if I can. Though I'll warn you (just as I probably did with the X-men thing), I'm probably not talented enough on Terragen to fulfill your wildest dreams :P

[iippo]: I'm a good girl: my wildest dreams aren't that wild at all. :P And the more eyes in the world that know of my project, the better. Trust me, soon you'll be spotting machinities in everything, they're all around us... X_x And when you spot them, you'll tell me and la: my project takes another step towards reality.

[Aradon Templar]: What are these... machinites?

[iippo]: Everything's a machine. o.O Even people. After doing machines all this year of uni... It's like a conspiracy, they are everywhere. It's worse than the Matrix, when you become aware of it. The world is full of machines that you didn't make and you don't know how to use, and that could injure you.

[syagre]: Hi there ! I too am a Terragen artist... (you may check out Syagre @deviantart)... actually, I was wondering about how you had such shades on the water in the pic displayed in your house... did you use any special pluggin, or is it just the consequence of the mixed effects of the cloud shading + variations according to the level of the lakes's bottom ?

[Aradon Templar]: Hm. I can't remember exactly what I did, though I've got a vague idea of things you might try. Usually, I lower light reflectivity a good amount. I drop it from 100% down to at least 30%, and I've done some with as low as 2%. It was probably somewhere around 10% with that picture. That created the blue that covers most of it. The yellow probably was from the clouds, yes. I had a yellow ish atmosphere setting, and probably fiddled a little with the sun coloring, and bumped up the light decay a little, which made the tinge on the clouds yellow. They of course reflected onto the water. Some patches weren't very colored, most likely because I bumped up the patch visibility and sizes, so patches of it were reflective and some of it wasn't.

In short, no, I didn't use a plugin, it was pretty much just clouds mixing with water.

[syagre]: uhm, I sort of guessed that. By the way, would be your computer powerful enough for running Terragen 2 ?? I've been quite amazed by the possibilities shown in the previews ! But looks like I'd have to buy a new PC...

[Aradon Templar]: Eh, sorry for patronising. I wasn't quite sure what you were referring to :\
I don't know if mine would be able to handle it. It looks like it'd be incredibly intensive, and my computer tends to have trouble with anything very large or complex, so I'm thinking that it could handle it, but be very, very slow.

I'm guessing, though, that Planetside's new system will be a little faster in what it does, though the capabilities will be higher; it'd take longer to render the complicated scenes, but I think it'd be comparably faster.

[syagre]: No doubt they have also improve all the routines for calculating the images, as they've implemented all Terragen2's new features ! So it's surely "comparably faster", as you say. But still, I wonder what kind of "beast of a PC" can handle the renderings easily (my old PC needs at least half an hour for big detailed renderings *gasp*)

[Aradon Templar]: Heh, Lakescape (the one on my house) took somewhere around 20 hours, I think. It's all that abominable water that does it. My goodness, never pump up the atmospheric accuracy and ultra smoothing if you have lots of water or clouds, and are rendering supersized x.X But yeah, I can imagine those pictures of the trees and the like are long renders, due to the detail. And just imagine them rendering those hundreds of tiny rocks on their images, it must have thrown the calculations off some. Perhaps people will end up using render farms just for picutres, rather than those animations :P

[syagre]: 20 hours ??? I never get as long as that ! Yeah, it's true that water rendering adds a very long time to it.... but how do you manage to "make tries and get previews" ? I'm used to do basic work in "low-details mode", but if it takes ages for you to do the same, then I wonder...
Then yes, rendering all the tiny rocks, or rendering a tree's leaves, that should be really time-consuming...

[Aradon Templar]: Well, for some of them, I render them for desktop sizes, but when I really like a piece, I'll render it supersized, or three times the desired size, and them resize it down. I've heard various opinions about the effectiveness, but I like the results, so I rendered it at around 3600x2400, and at full levels of accuracy and the like. It piles up really easy, at that point.
Of course, I only up the levels of detail and size when I've got the final image ready, so getting previews isn't usually a problem. Really, the most annoying thing about doing it like that is that it takes a long time to load Terragen while it's rendering, so if I minimize it, and try to check on the progress later, it takes several minutes at least to appear on the screen. If you check to see if it's still running, Windows says that it in fact is Not Responding, which has caused me to end Terragen prematurely, and restart the render with saved settings. It really doesn't freeze, though, Windows just says it does >.>

[syagre]: Oh, I see... actually I'm not a "registered user", so my rendering limit is 1280*960... I never go to extents of 3600*2400 !! No doubt you had so long renderings !
Then, concerning your troubles with windows saying "does not respond" while the rendering is being calculated, I've faced this many times as well... but if it were not rendering, the PC usage would never be 100 % ! Holy windows !

[Aradon Templar]: Eh, I don't even know if 3600x2400 is worth it for all the time it takes. If I can leave it on overnight without any problems, then it's alright, but the only difference is a little smoother of an image, and generally people can't tell the difference between a downsized one and one rendered at the same size. But I think as the surface coloring increases in complexity (2 layers to, say, 15) the downsizing tends to help, because it covers up the smaller gaps that the layers tend to create between the colors.

Oh, and really large terrains, like 527x527, take a lot longer to render too, so I avoid those. They also add a lot of unwanted atmoshperic haze.

[iippo]: Which page do I need to start watching to get updates on your new stuff? o.O

[Aradon Templar]: Heh, sorry. I did faff it all over. The row 9 will have the new updates, but I'll add the titles of new pieces to this page, too, so this one will change when I add something new. Sorry, I was just noticing how painfully long the load time was getting.