Populator Guide

Populators are one of the more important nodes in Terragen. Populators allow you to quickly and easily cover large areas with many copies of an object. You can use populators to create forests, meadows, rocky wastes and much, much more. Please read the pages below to find out more about using Populators.

Working with Populations
This page introduces you to populations and how to work with them.

Population Instance Editing
This guide describes how you can edit individual instances in a population to precisely control your scene.

Population Instance Caching
This page tells you how to make use of population instance caching to speed up population loading.

Tutorials

Population Colour Tinting Techniques
This tutorial shows you how to use the tinting tools to change the colours of instances in lots of interesting ways.

Masking Populations with Inverted Fractals
This tutorial shows you some methods to create distinct bands of objects in overlapping populations.

Tutorial: Population Masking Techniques
This tutorial shows you how to create masks for populations using various techniques like Simple shape shaders and the Painted shader.

A shader is a program or set of instructions used in 3D computer graphics to determine the final surface properties of an object or image. This can include arbitrarily complex descriptions of light absorption and diffusion, texture mapping, reflection and refraction, shadowing, surface displacement and post-processing effects. In Terragen 2 shaders are used to construct and modify almost every element of a scene.