SceneTerrain 0.9 release notes

September 16, 2016

This release is a major one, the last in SceneTerrain's 0.x development cycle. The main new feature is the addition of populations of objects on the terrain, such as trees, rocks, grass or anything you want.

Changelog

• new: populations - any object can be mass-placed easily and efficiently on the terrain
• new: 15 high-poly textured trees included, nicely organized, and easy to import, ready to populate your terrains with forests and vegetation
• new: several vertex groups are now generated on the terrain: water, slopes, beaches, height, trees, city
• change: removed the material shortcut options to change the terrain textures. The material must now be edited manually: more future-proof, and allows better user control
• improvement: optimized code for faster terrain generation
• improvement: the textures generated from the terrain data are now saved automatically in Blender's temp directory each time you generate a terrain
• improvement: added a button to re-apply the default material on the terrain, in case you lose it or want the default one back
• improvement: better GUI layout, labels and descriptions
• deprecation: the Blender Internal renderer is no longer supported, Cycles has higher priority. You can still use BI if you wish, I just won't take it into account anymore in future developments

Populations

Add hundreds of thousands of trees, rocks, grass clumps, and any other object on the terrains. SceneTerrain uses Blender's powerful instancing capabilities with particles, allowing a virtually infinite number of instances at no additional memory or CPU cost, no matter their polygon count. Blender's faces counter can't even keep up, it overflows :)

Start from your regular terrains, like before:

Then simply choose an object, such as a tree, and with a click, you have your terrain covered with a dense forest. You can add several populations for more variations and details. Also you can tune the spatial density of trees by manually painting the vertices in weight paint mode. Tune their number, size, rotation and other options in their particle settings.

Included trees library

To get started populating your terrains, 15 high poly trees have been added: 5 species, with 3 size variations for each: adult, medium and young. Modeled from real species, complete with textures and materials.

They're also very easy to import in any of your projects: simply choose one from the thumbnails, or import all of them at once. On each thumbnail you can see their height, a human silhouette for size comparison, and their common name plus scientific name (which makes for very long names ;)

Generated textures

These images are saved in Blender's temp directory each time you generate a terrain. They're very useful to control the material, but for other things as well, like controlling the populations position, density etc... Note that they're overwritten with each new terrain, so save on the side those you want to keep!

Terrain from 3d viewport, beaches, heights, mountains, slopes, urban ground, underwater.

Generated vertex groups

These are useful for the populations, and any other use you can think of: terrain from 3d viewport, beaches, heights, water, slopes, trees, city ground

Last free update for SceneCity 0.x users

Finally, please note that this is the last release of SceneTerrain in the 0.x release cycle, meaning that if you bought SceneCity before version 1.0, and you haven't upgraded yet, you will not receive any more free updates. If you wish to upgrade to 1.x, you can do so from your account, with a discount! If you have any question on this subject, do not hesitate to contact me.

Happy Blending! :)