skybox scripting?

[Harvey Birdman]

My apologies if this information is available elsewhere - I'm just a little impatient.


Unlike the skybox tutorial writer, I don't have any issues with cube face alignment or anything like that - the images come out perfect. I would like to automate the process of creating 6 images once I've settled on a viewpoint, though. It occurs to me that it might be possible to create a 6 frame animation script that didn't actually translate the camera, but points in the different directions (or maybe uses a different camera for each frame?) Like I said, I can get fine results manually, but I need to find away to automate the process and I'm totally ignorant of TG2's scripting capabilities. Can someone (BigBen, maybe?) point me in the right direction?

[old_blaggard]

It's actually quite easy to set up a six-frame animation.  Simply assign the direction in which the camera needs to point, set it as a keyframe, move to the next frame, change your direction, and repeat.  If you need help figuring out just how to assign keyframes and such, either run a search on these forums or just let us know in this thread .

[Harvey Birdman]

Thank you very much. I'm off to experiment. One more quick query, if I may. Assuming I can set up the 6 frames, does the app support exporting the camera/animation settings?

Sorry if the question is naive; I'm just learning.

[old_blaggard]

I don't think TG2 supports exporting animation scripts right now - I know it can import .chan file formats, but I don't think it can export.  Oshyan would know more about this than I, though, so I'd recommend waiting for a definitive answer from him.

[Harvey Birdman]

Wow! Snappy response!



Cool - I'll see if he spots this tomorrow. I'm planning on setting up a couple of my machines here as part-time rendering stations. The ability to export the scripts from my main desktop machine would be helpful.

[Oshyan]

There is no native camera data export yet, but it seems like a few people are working on converters from .tgd to various formats. For non-interpolated (keyframe on every frame) animations this should be trivial. For interpolated animations you'd want to use the "Bake Animation Curves" option on the Project menu.

Also remember to turn off Motion Blur in the camera settings, otherwise you'll get a very blurred result from this "fast" camera move.

- Oshyan

[bigben]

It's quite easy to set up a reusable clip file for creating cube renders. (Requires the Deep + animation version)

• Set up your renderer with the relevant quality settings and output size.
• Set up your camera with the relevant key frames, fov etc...
• Select both the render node and the camera node and save as a clip file.

The next time you're working on a TGD and want to render a cube of your present location, insert the clip file, select the renderer and then click on "set camera" in the preview window. This will transfer your existing camera position to the camera for the cube renderer. Then all you need to do is render the sequence.

If you have  a lot of objects you should also read this:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=954.0

[Harvey Birdman]

Thanks for the help, folks. Cool. Shouldn't be a problem.

[bigben]

Here's my basic clip file. 

The camera positioning trick I mentioned was a little off.  After selecting the cube render (or cube camera), ALT + left click in the preview window to make the "Set Camera" option available and then select it.

[Harvey Birdman]

Excellent! I'll be back soon with my next question.