FAQs and Troubleshooting

White Spots, Holes, or Missing Geometry in Terrain

If you encounter renders that have white spots in the terrain, speckles, or the appearance of random polygons of background color through the terrain, then you are probably seeing some missing geometry. The white speckles are holes in your terrain geometry showing the sky in the background. This often happens with more extreme displacement settings. To address this problem there are several possible methods.

• First, you can try increasing Displacement Tolerance in the planet node. Try 1.5 or 2, we do not recommend going higher if this does not fix the problem. Note that this will increase the render time.
• You can try clicking the "Check Animation Settings" button to see if this addresses it. This may affect the look of your terrain and may also affect render time. The Animation Check button is only available in licensed versions of Terragen. If you don't have a license, you can go into the *Internal* network of the render node and paste the following:

<terragen_clip>
<render_subdiv_settings
name = "Render subdiv settings 01"
gui_use_node_pos = "1"
gui_node_pos = "1160 -60 0"
gui_group = ""
fully_adaptive = "1"
microvertex_jittering = "1"
force_all_edges = "1"
detail_jittering = "0"
displacement_filter = "1"
jitter_shading_points = "0"
ray_detail_multiplier = "0.25"
stabilise_ray_detail_in_motion = "0"
ray_detail_stabilisation = "3"
>
</render_subdiv_settings>
</terragen_clip>

• If neither of those two approaches address the problem, you may have to adjust your displacement settings in the displacement-creating nodes. This could consist of effects from multiple nodes, look especially at anything that is creating strong or very small-scale displacement.
• Finally, you can also try a larger Compute Terrain patch size, but as with the displacement changes it will likely change the look of the terrain.

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.

A single object or device in the node network which generates or modifies data and may accept input data or create output data or both, depending on its function. Nodes usually have their own settings which control the data they create or how they modify data passing through them. Nodes are connected together in a network to perform work in a network-based user interface. In Terragen 2 nodes are connected together to describe a scene.