Terragen 3 Wishlist - Ghosts of TGD Past, Present, and Future.

Started by Upon Infinity, December 30, 2013, 03:56:30 PM

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Tangled-Universe

Planetside seems to dodge/evade the noise flavor discussion in this topic, completely?

Upon Infinity

#106
Why is the issue of wind not given any serious consideration?  Is there already a way to do it without a dedicated function for it?  Or is it simply too difficult for the way that Terragen has been set up?  That, and some more advanced animation features are really the only things keeping Terragen from being the perfect landscape renderer, especially after the 3.0 and 3.1 updates.

TheBadger

Well, on wind, MAtt said he wanted to add this. So Im sure he will in time. But I don't mind waiting till after planetside finishes the other things they are woking on. THough I do agree with the things you are saying. TG is already a lot more than a simple terrain generator. And if they did not have big plans for the future, why would they have made it so open and robust in the first place? Heres hoping!

Would also second Martin's observation. But I suspect that the only reason Oshyan has not responded already is because the update is looming.
Its funny to see planetside's screen names pop up in blue in the active user list for a few seconds a day. The update could be here at any moment!.. it feels like.
It has been eaten.

Oshyan

We definitely *have* given wind functions consideration. No other program that I'm aware of can do realistic "wind" on *non-procedural* objects in large numbers of instances. In other words, if you import a standard OBJ into any other program and create a large number of instances of it (with e.g. Vray Scatter), you can't do wind on it realistically. You could do geometry deformation procedurally, which you can do in Terragen 3 now with the "Mesh displacer" input for all imported objects, but this affects the whole object and that's pretty unrealistic, for example the same magnitude of motion on a trunk vs. a branch vs. a leaf. The effect can be masked by e.g. height for a more realistic look, but it's still of limited realism, and that's all any other program would be able to do. The issue of actually creating realistic wind animation on arbitrary imported objects is quite challenging. Lacking a system to determine the "stiffness" of individual elements, how do you make it realistic? It's something we want to look at and hopefully resolve in the future, but it's certainly a challenge, not something that will come easily.

- Oshyan

gregtee

At least from my experience and workflows available to people in my area of work, at the very least being able to import geo cache sequences of wind deformed trees done out of say Speedtree would be very beneficial.  I don't expect TG to be able to do the deformations themselves, but it seems rather trivial by comparison for TG to be able to import these alembic type caches, offset them as needed and populate it all around your terrains.  Maybe that is more involved but it seems simpler than actually having TG perform the displacements and would go a long way towards getting TG more entrenched in production workflows. 
Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

Oshyan

Yes, we do plan to support Alembic in the future. Allowing for multiple sequence offsets would be great but I don't know how challenging that would be.

- Oshyan

Oshyan

Regarding new noise functions, we do intend to add more at some point in the future. But we don't have a specific release date for that.

One of the things about TG's noise functions and their implementation to-date is they're not as simple as the basic forms you might often see out there, and this is in several respects. First, they've been setup and tuned specifically to work well in TG, both in terms of the rendering process, as well as the actual usefulness of the output (think for example of the way Lead-in scale vs. Feature scale vs. Smallest scale works). Second, additional controls and functions such as warping, etc. are usually added. Third, in some cases controls have actually been simplified for ease of use or removed due to implementation or compatibility concerns.

So when we contemplate adding new noise functions, if we're to make something that for example adds in to the Power Fractal, it has more considerations than just adding a simple off-the-shelf noise function. That being said, we're certainly thinking about simpler options as well, both for reasons of implementation speed, and allowing more simple use (think of a simple Perlin Generator, or the Voronoi Function Node except without requiring an input). But simpler is less powerful too. As I said, we're considering these various options for the eventual implementation of more noise functions, which we do have planned.

- Oshyan

mhaze


TheBadger

It has been eaten.

PabloMack

Quote from: Oshyan on February 24, 2014, 06:38:07 PMYes, we do plan to support Alembic in the future. Allowing for multiple sequence offsets would be great but I don't know how challenging that would be.

I just upgraded to Lightwave 11.6 which says in its release notes that it supports Alembic Object/Cache Loading.

Aleksei

Hello, Planetside team!
First of all, let me say thank you for your efforts in creating such a nice tool for realistic worlds creation! I'm very inspired by what you're doing and your goals.

Yesterday I was watching your videos on Youtube and in one of them there was a question about using different objects in one population. You said that this is the direction you're working on, but you need more time to research on users' feedback regarding interface needs, triggers etc... So at that moment I thought that you can be inspired by Cinema 4D's Cloner Object which is actually works very good with any kind of populations with random (or organized) objects.
Multi-purpose Design Tool: • NORDSKILL •

Matt

Thanks for the suggestion, p34, and welcome to the forum!

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

N810

I'd love to have a small library of objects, presets, and plugins.
Kind of like TG 0.9 had back in the day.  ;)
Hmmm... wonder what this button does....

Oshyan

TG3 already has a small library of those things (well, except for plugins, which aren't available yet, but are coming). Free version users get access to the presets, including a few materials, sky presets, and a couple complete demo scenes, as well as some free objects from Xfrog and Silva3D. These are available on the free downloads page here:
http://planetside.co.uk/products/download-tg3

Licensed users have some additional downloads (mainly more plant models) available in the Downloads section of My Account in our online store.

- Oshyan