How to start with Tiny planets?

[lpeek]

Hi all, I'm just wondering if there are any rough tutorials or tips for creating tiny planets? The main issue I keep coming across is positioning the planet. is there not just a 0,0,0 point where I can center to and start from there? Whenever I reduce a planet in size and move it around the positions are always measurements like 6.327e+07. I haven't really used measurements like this before so I'm a bit confused as to what to do, and other 3d programs I've used usually have a centerpoint where everything is 0. Yet as soon as change any measurement on my planet in Terragen the object just whizzes somewhere off the screen never to be seen again, regardless of how far I zoom out.

Is there any kind of documentation/tutorials for TG2? Positioning seems to be a really basic thing that I though would have been documented how to use it properly?

Another issue us that without knowing how to use positioning, I almost got a tiny planet working by reducing the radius of a planet to something like 5000 in it's default position, but when I zoom in to it, I assume because I haven't reset the position back to a center point it wont let me zoom in far enough. My renders always render the planet really far away even after setting the render camera to the current preview.

I'd like to eventually get to something like the attached image. Ignore all the extra objects added to the planets, just the size/terrain of the small planets is what I'm after.

Cheeers!

[jo]

Hi,

The way to do this is to make the Y coord of the Centre of the planet the opposite of the Radius.

Let's say you want a planet with a radius of 5000m. Set the Radius to 5000. Change the Y coord of the Centre to -5000.

TG2 is set up by default so that the origin of the scene is at the "north pole" of the main planet. The reason for this is that as you get further from the origin of the scene the values used for positioning get less accurate. That means you want the origin to be as close to where you're creating your scene as possible. You do have to be quite a long way from the origin before this starts  to be a problem. IIRC on the default planet you're starting to lose finer details as get close to the equator.

By kind of offsetting the planet vertically by the same distance as the radius (which is what the -5000 is doing) the origin gets placed at the surface of the planet.

Regards,

Jo

[jo]

Hi,

I've written an explanation for using different sized planets and some diagrams showing what's going on when you do what I describe in my previous post. You can see it in the Planet page in the node docs:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Planet

Regards,

Jo

[TheBadger]

Hi,
There is also a step by step tut on the subject a user posted: http://www.markflorquin.be/blog/2012/04/terragen-2-4-little-planet-tutorial/

@jo, thanks! I didn't know you had done work on this. I'll be glad to read it!

I always wanted to do an animation where a bunch of dust particles are really little planets. So when the camera zooms out it looks like dust or spores but when it zooms in they are little worlds. But instead of dr. seuss characters, the planets are populated by Ebola viruses or mutant contaminants. Could make a good opening sequence for a zombie flick, or end of the world movie