Planetside has released Terragen Mac, a scenery generator. The software, compatible with Mac OS X (10.1 and higher) and Mac OS 9.x, is designed for creating photorealistic landscape images and animations.
The application touts some Mac-only features, some of which will “likely make their way into the Windows version at some point in time, but many of them will remain unique to Terragen Mac,” according to Planetside.
Terragen Mac supports AppleScript for automation and animation. It has several Altivec/Velocity Engine optimizations that accelerate performance on G4 and G5 Macs. G4 and newer. Terragen Mac also takes advantage of Quartz, Mac’s graphics engine and QuickTime.
QuickTime is used for a variety of tasks from saving images to importing images to use as terrains to creating QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) panorama movies. The software supports generation of cubic and cylindrical QTVR panoramas. Planetside says there are plans for additions to the QTVR generation in the works. Plus, in the future ,there are plans to add support for turning your animations into QT movies from within Terragen Mac.
Terragen Mac supports rendering directly to a file, reducing the amount of RAM used during rendering. It has a 3D preview that uses OpenGL, the cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), which means you can move around the terrain in real time. The 3D Preview will also match the aspect ratio of the final image. For now navigation in the 3D Preview is accomplished through the keyboard and mouse, but support for other input devices, such as gamepads and joysticks, is coming.
Terragen Mac’s Snapshot system lets you record your position when you find a shot you like. This position and other relevant settings are written out to a Terragen native script file, which you can run at any time to have all shots rendered out at once.
Registration is compulsory for commercial use. For personal noncommercial use you don’t need to register, but purchasing a registration will expand Terragen’s capabilities and entitle you to other benefits. A single user license costs US$79; multi-user license packs and educational discounts are available.
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