Few Questions

[dhavalmistry]

Hey guys, I have been away from Terragen 2 scene for a while and I am starting to get back into it again. As I refresh my memory, there are some things that I cant seem to recall, so I figured I would just ask you experts.

1) How separate the different elements in the render? Meaning how do I only render clouds, or only atmosphere or only terrain, so that I can tweak these things individually in a compositing software.

2) what file formats are supported when rendering a sequence?

3) Does rendering in exr, give me a 16 bit image?

4) What are the default scene units in TG2?

5) When is the animation module going to be released?

Any help would be apperciated!

Thanks in advance!

[Oshyan]

1: There are various methods, and it can depend on which elements you specifically want to separate. For simple clouds vs. terrain you can use the Render Surface and Render Atmosphere check boxes in the Planet node. For only atmosphere, you could disable the clouds, and assign a full coverage top-level black shader to the surface shader of the planet. Some elements will take some ingenuity to separate out. We'll be providing better tools in this area in the future.

2: All file formats that are supposed for normal saves are supported for sequence rendering. This should be: BMP, TIFF, RGB/SGI, EXR

3: I think it's actually 32bit/channel, but 16bit/channel at the least.

4: Meters, in almost all cases (where distance is measured, at least; some things are not distance measurements, e.g. color values). This is not currently configurable, i.e. it is *the* unit of measure, not just the "default".

5: Soon.

- Oshyan

[dhavalmistry]

ok so I only wanna render out clouds and have alpha channel of the clouds. I dont want any terrain or atmosphere, how would I go about doing that?

[Matt]

On the Planet node, turn off "render surface".
On the atmosphere node, turn off "enable primary", to make the atmosphere invisible. You can leave "enable secondary" on so that the atmosphere still changes the colour of the sunlight hitting the clouds and casts global illumination onto the clouds. The only thing you won't get is the hazing effect of the atmosphere between the camera and the clouds.

Matt

[dhavalmistry]

Thanks Matt. What about the alpha channel?

[dandelO]

If you press keyboard 'A' with the render window in focus it will display the alpha image. Similarly works for the R,G and B images too.

[dhavalmistry]

how can I save the alpha channel?

[Matt]

If you save the image while it's displaying the alpha, it will save the alpha.

Matt

[dhavalmistry]

If you press keyboard 'A' with the render window in focus it will display the alpha image. Similarly works for the R,G and B images too.

I am trying to display alpha in the preview widow. When I press A, nothing happens. Same with R (asks me ifI want to reset the 3d view) and G. I have disabled the terrain and the atmosphere.

[Matt]

It works in the Render View, on the image you've rendered or are in the middle of rendering.

Matt

[dhavalmistry]

sorry my bad, I read it wrong!

[dhavalmistry]

I have one more question. How do I get TG2 to save out alpha channel if its rendering on a render farm?

[freelancah]

"Extra output images" is the path where alpha will be saved

[dhavalmistry]

thanks!