Experts' Opinions On Terragen Suitability

[cragganmore]

I'm going to be working on an animation project, and I'm trying to decide between Terragen and Vue.  I've read many, many discussion topics here and done some tests using the free version, but I'd like to get insight from people who've had empirical experience doing this stuff.

Here's what I need to be able to do:

• Create my animations in Maya and transfer the animation data into Terragen for rendering
• Animate a boat object (created in Maya) on the surface of an ocean
• Animate both bow waves and stern wakes for the boat
• Animate various sea states (e.g. varying degrees of rough water / wave sizes, from calm to stormy)
• Animate a submarine object (created in Maya) under water
• In the underwater scene, animate both caustics and Godrays
• In the underwater scene, animate suspended particulate matter in the water (e.g. bits of plankton / detritus / small fuzzy junk floating in the water that will provide some reference for the submarine's motion when the seafloor isn't visible)
• Move my camera seamlessly back and forth from above water to underwater
• When the camera is below water, I need to be able to see through the water surface to the above water parts of the boat

To be clear, I'd prefer to render everything in Terragen (as opposed to compositing Maya and Terragen renders), both to leverage the beauty of Terragen's renderer and to preserve the consistency of things like reflections of the boat on the water.

From what I've gathered, the bow waves and stern wakes may be difficult to do?  I've seen Hannes' amazing results (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9877.0), but I have no idea how to replicate his technique.

Additionally, it seems like Terragen isn't particularly suited for underwater scenes?  From everything I've read so far, I get the impression that underwater scenes need to be faked by inverting the water plane and using a blue atmosphere fog?  If so, I'm not clear how this will affect moving the camera between under water and above water. 

I saw dandelO's caustics (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9998.0), but I haven't found a way to implement Godrays.

Vue appears to be able to do underwater stuff and boat wakes well, and at this point I'm leaning toward it based on its inherent capabilities.  However, my own opinion is that Terragen generates much more realistic images, and if I could, I'd rather use it instead.

Could anyone with experience in these areas give me some idea of the feasibility of doing all this in Terragen?  I'd love to hear what you guys think.  Please prove me wrong so that I can choose Terragen.

Thanks in advance for your insight.

[Dune]

I don't know all the answers, but the first thing springing to mind regarding the water plane object (to be seen from below and above) is to duplicate the object and reverse one of them. Stick all wave nodes into both. Theoretical idea, though, never tried it.

Good luck, and I'm sure others will jump in with more advice.

[Hetzen]

If Vue can do all that, and you're familiar with Vue, then use Vue.

You have some pretty hard asks here, not impossible mind, but bare in mind the steep learning curve of both apps and factor that in to your project timings.

[Hannes]

Hi,

I'm Hannes, one of the guys you mentioned in your thread (thank you for your nice words).
Although a lot of things can be done both in Vue as in TG as well, I don't think that it's a good idea to insist on creating everything you want inside one of the packages. I don't know, if what you are planning is a private project or a commercial one, and how big your budget is.

Imho a combination of softwares would be the best solution. I don't know if there's a way to use TG together with Maya.
I only used 3ds Max together with TG, and it's working well. So if you need algea and stuff inside the water, you need a particle system. If you want to have a transition between surface and subsurface, it might be possible to fake this in TG, but it would be very difficult to make it look convincing.
Yes, boat wakes can be done in TG, and it may look quite good, but honestly animating an ocean surface together with foam generation is not TG's strongest part.

[goldfarb]

• Create my animations in Maya and transfer the animation data into Terragen for rendering
• Animate a boat object (created in Maya) on the surface of an ocean
• Animate both bow waves and stern wakes for the boat
• Animate various sea states (e.g. varying degrees of rough water / wave sizes, from calm to stormy)
• Animate a submarine object (created in Maya) under water
• In the underwater scene, animate both caustics and Godrays
• In the underwater scene, animate suspended particulate matter in the water (e.g. bits of plankton / detritus / small fuzzy junk floating in the water that will provide some reference for the submarine's motion when the seafloor isn't visible)
• Move my camera seamlessly back and forth from above water to underwater
• When the camera is below water, I need to be able to see through the water surface to the above water parts of the boat

compositing is your friend.

if you've got Maya, and have animations there, you could export them to terragen for rendering, keep in mind that the shading will be very different...
but...
why not
animate your boat in maya
do the waves (and foam and spray etc) in maya - but export out the deforming surface and render that + boat, to get the reflection passes
all the is ocean stuff will be way easier and better in maya (check out HOT for maya http://vimeo.com/8049991 )
particulate matter in the water - maya

use terragen to create background plates/reflection maps that you can use in maya...
bust up everything you can into single elements and bring them into terragen for rendering of little extras you can comp in...

even if I were a strong terragen user (which I'm not) I'd never try to do this kind of project just in terragen (or vue for that matter)...
nothing against terragen (or vue) but none of these things will be easy, and terragen just isn't built to do these things.

[freelancah]

I dont see the need to use terragen or vue in this project at all. To me it looks like its doable inside maya and mixing up software would just cause you more work

[freelancah]

Alltho if you want to use terragen you might wanna look at this for underwater animation by Dandel0. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12308.0  It's pretty much impossible task to do all you want in just terragen or vue, you will be better off with compositing stuff.

[Hetzen]

I just want to echo the Composite route. I'm pretty certain you will spend an exponential amount of time trying to get everything to look right in one package over knowing the strengths of others to enhance your main application. Especially if it's animating. No doubt about that at all.

I'd rather look at a composite and say "you know what? that's not working." and go to a layer to tweak, rather than having to render the whole thing again, especially if you have a 3hr overhead per frame.

Some tweaks may just need a mask, be it rendered or drawin in with a spline to get it right, especially with your under water particles.

What I would say about TG over Vue, from a production angle, is that TG is very stable and reliable.

Both are capable of producing stunning results, one maybe better than the other at different things. Like all packages.

I've seen Maya do some convincing rough sea, and I'd probably like to have some mechanical connection with the boat. So I'd more than likely want to do most of this in Maya, and use Vue or TG for a skydome.

[JimB]

"From what I've gathered, the bow waves and stern wakes may be difficult to do?"

Not a Maya user, but an XSI user. It's been a while since I did similar to what you're looking to do, but I expect the process is the same.

* Do your deformation of a grid/patch in Maya for the wake and bow waves.
* Add a vertical gradient texture (black to white) to the grid, projecting along the X or Z axis of the grid, the projection/support tall enough to cover the entire vertical height of the grid when deformed.
* Set up an orthographic camera (texcam) so that it follows the boat directly above, pointed straight down and always covering the wake and bow waves, and render the animation of the deformed grid through that camera (creates a heightfield animation for Terragen).
* Export a .chan of the texcam and import into Terragen.
* Use your rendered animated  heightfield in an Image Map shader that plugs into your water shader, projected from your imported texcam.

You can plug surface shaders into the water shader, so by limiting the minimum height you should be able to get froth on the waves. IIRC, you can also displace the froth (don't hold me to that, it's been a while). If you look at the animation at the link you can see some waves rising, speeding up and falling. They're from an animated height map created in XSI (I think they were Gerstner waves) displacing on top of the existing Terragen water which was also animated.

http://s331.photobucket.com/albums/l469/jimbowers/TESTS/?action=view&current=xsi_tg2_waves_test_06.mp4

Something like that, anyway.

[JimB]

Come to think of it, you might get away with a single frame of the Maya boat waves if the boat's only going straight. The TG water might break it up nicely, especially if the water's animated.

[cragganmore]

Thank you so much for your ideas and suggestions, everyone.  They are very much appreciated.  Lots of stuff to mull over...

If I come to a workable solution, I'll let you guys know what I end up with and how it worked.

Jon