Terragen Tips and Tricks

Render settings recommendations

Some tips on how to optimize your render times and quality thanks to Oshyan.

Ideas on how to make caves

Few ideas in this post of how to do caves. dandelO found using a plane object with a crater shader rotated, and Seth uses canyons converging

Waterfalls

From water - A not quite finished idea on waterfalls, but has amazing results so far.
From clouds - a method of creating waterfalls from cloud objects with a painted shader.

Redirect and Warp Shaders

Details about how they work with displacement. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7035.0

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.

Literally, to change the position of something. In graphics terminology to displace a surface is to modify its geometric (3D) structure using reference data of some kind. For example, a grayscale image might be taken as input, with black areas indicating no displacement of the surface, and white indicating maximum displacement. In Terragen 2 displacement is used to create all terrain by taking heightfield or procedural data as input and using it to displace the normally flat sphere of the planet.