Possible to automate renders with free version?

[Garasaki]

Hi all,

First thanks for all the knowledge dropped on this forum.  Has helped me a ton.

I am here to ask a simple question, but let me provide some background.

I am involved with content creation for video games, motocross games in particular.  The best (IMO) motocross (mx) game right now is an independently developed game called MX Simulator.  It's a really interesting project - a single person has developed this game entirely on his own time, basically as a hobby.  He's really hit the nail on the head and produced the most realistic mx game ever.  Website is www.mxsimulator.com if you are interested.

There is an active community which includes a lot of talented content creators.  I am currently working on using TG2 for creation of skyboxes.

I've made it my priority to develop a process for creating the skyboxes without having to pirate any software.  As such, I've dealt with the limitations of the free version of TG2 and eventually figured out how to render 20 separate images, which Hugin is able to stitch together for my skycube.  Here are some examples of the results ingame.





I do this by rendering each file, saving, changing the camera, rendering again, etc.  It's time consuming but I don't mind it too much.

I recently developed a really nice sky with the help of the cloud library here.  However the render times are huge.  About 5 hours for each file (remember there are 20).  So I'd really love to automate the rendering process so I could start the renders and leave them go for a few days to complete on their own.

Again, I am developing the process based on the free version of TG2.  Does anyone know if it is possible to automate the renders?  And how to do it?

[N810]

You would have to do it the Hard Way and render them one frame at a time
and sequence them together in some other program... With morfing and tweening
you could stretch out the frames a little bit...  


Although there might be some free animation untilites for Terragen Clasic,
also the render times would be a Lot Shorter, and the clouds are almost as good.

[Garasaki]

Well it's not so much the animation I care about (although as I understand it, that is a way to batch render), however if I had the full version, I'd just render the easy way (4 side images and a top image, all at 90* FOV) to get the resolution I desire.

I've made a lot of skies with classic terragen, and you are right - there are batch files which allow you to automate rendering.  It's also easier because the unregistered version of classic terrgen gives you a higher resolution then (unregistered) TG2.

Classic TG definately does nice skys with lower render times, but it really can't hold a candle to TG2 in terms of the variety of clouds it can produce.

[N810]

Oops my bad I could have sworn I read the word Animate in there some where...
I guess it must have been automate that I read...


What you are looking for is some sort of command line script...
I think I rembere a few post where some of our pros where using them,
to render batches of images.... 

[neuspadrin]

Oops my bad I could have sworn I read the word Animate in there some where...
I guess it must have been automate that I read...


What you are looking for is some sort of command line script...
I think I rembere a few post where some of our pros where using them,
to render batches of images.... 

If I recall correctly, command line options (except certain visual differences such as disable 3d preview/node network) are not allowed for free version, such that you can't just make a script do it for you.

[airflamesred]

and WRC2010 on it's way!

[FrankB]

... and the clouds are almost as good.

<cough> ... strong disagree!

[N810]

Shhhh...

I am trying to be encourageing. 

[Garasaki]

and WRC2010 on it's way!

Followed all the replies except this one     What is WRC2010?  World rafting championship?  New Rally game??

Many of the posts I found via search referenced use of the command line, and that it wasn't available in the free version, but I thought maybe that has changed (those posts were all at least 2 years old).  It would be a gillion times easier if I could do this via script, but I guess that's a carrot planetside gets to dangle in front of me.

Here is a gratuitis preview of the sky I am currently working on (this is one of the 20 frames I have to render, at 6 hours rendering time each!).  I think we can all agree that TG classic couldn't pull this one off.

[Klas]

You can try using AutoIt to control TG2.