Short movie production. Forest scene!

[kkolompar]

Hello everybody...I´m at the moment creating a short animated movie. The very first scene contains some plants and trees. A kind of "foresty" feeling to it. What I want to do is to animate them moving by a strong wind. Leaves flying around and so on.
I´m currently working in Maya 2012 and Im thinking about purchasing Terragen 2, but I was wondering if you know the fastest and most effective way to make this scene.

I was thinking of making the landscape and the forest in Terragen 2 and then export this to Maya where I could use dynamics simulating the wind...is that possible?

Hope to hear from you soon..

[kkolompar]

Maybe If I´m more specific it will help.

-Create trees that will move directed by the wind.
-I want to make plants that will do the same.
-leaves flying in the wind
-rain

[ajcgi]

I use Softimage alongside Terragen. From a usability and tweaking perspective, anything that's moving that isn't water or the camera is often simpler to add in your 3d software. I sure as hell wouldn't attempt a full on animated forest in Terragen, but know ways I'd approach the same thing in Softimage, perhaps using Terragen to give me the landscape onto which I place my instantiated foliage, trees etc.

That's the way I'd go.

[Oshyan]

Animating tree and leaf movement is not a specific, native function in TG2 and so is not easy (but not impossible) to accomplish. See this previous discussion thread:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12191.0

If you want a good deal of control over the animation of your vegetation objects it may be best done in another app at this point, although with the Object Sequence support in Terragen 2.3 you could potentially import and render the animated result in TG 2.

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

Oshyan, would you explain this Object Sequence support better so people like me can understand it better? 

Animating tree and leaf movement is not a specific, native function in TG2 and so is not easy (but not impossible) to accomplish. See this previous discussion thread:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12191.0

If you want a good deal of control over the animation of your vegetation objects it may be best done in another app at this point, although with the Object Sequence support in Terragen 2.3 you could potentially import and render the animated result in TG 2.

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

It's the same as the image sequence support in the imagemap shader.
There you can use %04d as a command to load file-sequences.
In the case of %04d it means it expects inputs like: "mask.0001.bmp" "mask.0002.bmp" etc.
Logically %05d expects "mask.00001.bmp".

Now in an object-maker or object-node you can use the exact same similar syntax to load an object sequence.
Logically, this only works for Deep + Animation.

[red_planet]

Not wishing to sound like a total newbie...because I'm not, but where is the object sequence defined or pointed to in TG ?
I have looked around the object, camera and render dialogs to try and find somewhere to define where to pick up an object sequence.
I have managed to get Blender (still trying to find a way to do it in MAX !) to export obj sequences, I would now like to render them in TG. Primarily because I'm using TG as the environment and experiments to date with using TG generated environment maps in MAX have proved tricky and less than satisfactory..

I am running TG2 2.3.20.1

I have a feeling this is most likely going to involve editing xml somewhere along the line....

Any pointers/help gratefully received...

Chris

[Henry Blewer]

You'll need to use the Blender obj exporter from the File/Export menu. I have not tried this out. The filename has the standard format mentioned earlier.

Blender will export a chain of objects using the exporter. These can be rigged character/machines or animated foliage. The difficulty with Blender objects, is they do not have any scale data outside Blender. Each object ends up 1 meter 'square'. Lightwave would probably work much better.

[Oshyan]

This forum post will tell you how to load object sequences:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12653.msg126056#msg126056

- Oshyan

[red_planet]

Thanks for input chaps, strangely enough the solution arrived in my head when I was brushing my teeth this morning !

Works a treat...

For others who need a quick answer, the solution is in the filename specified for the object sequence. Where you have an object sequence, let's say obj_0001.obj to obj_0010.obj substitute %04d for the sequence number, e.g obj_%04d.obj. I'm guessing that this signifies a 4 character numeric string replacement and that you replace the 4 with the number of characters that identify the sequence number.

Apologies for hijacking thread...The trees are amazing....

Rgds

Chris