Here it is guys.
I will try to explain why and how I create this animation.
First of all, I would not consider it as an artistic performance.
For 2 reasons : first I took very few hours on scene and second everything have been made to
reduce render time.
Ok birth of the project : it was a simple discussion with a friend who showed me on Youtube
a timelapse. And then he asked me if I would be able to simulate a Timelapse with Terragen.
This question was the big bang instant of this project.
I thought the idea was very interesting because the animations usually seem to be in a world where
time is frozen.
Here it would be the opposite. Just not moving and let's watch the time pass by.
The idea was to make something realistic.
So I would animate the sun (in order to simulate the earth rotation around the sun).
For something realistic, i found a very useful website :
http://www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tools/pos_sun.phpThis website gives you the position of the Sun for any place in the world for any time.
I choose Douarnenez (the place where I live and the date of 21st of March – spring day).
I got an excel file which gave the sun position every 10 minutes from Dawn to Sunset.
I thought a 1 minute Timelapse would be fine.
With FPS at 25, it was a 1500 frames project.
From Dawn to Sunset, i had to find the interval then, it appeared that 30 seconds would be perfect also for calculations.
As i said, I got the position of the sun every 10 minutes, so it means every 20 frames.
It is not difficult to find an average position for each frame.
If Position B = Position A+ 10 minutes, then you have to make a formula like
Position A + 30 seconds = Position A + ((Position B – Position A)/20)
Position A + 1 minutes = Position A + (2 x ((Position B – Position A)/20))
and so on..
At the end, I got an excel file with the sun Position for every frame (the calculation for each interval of 30 seconds is not completely correct but it is a good average).
The second thing to animate was the render camera.
I decided that the sun would be on the left of the 1st frame and would be on the right of the last frame.
So the heading of the sun must 25 degrees less than rotation Y of the render camera in frame 1
and 25 degrees more than rotation Y of the render camera in last frame.
It appeared that rotation of the camera should be about 131 degrees from frame 1 to last one.
Again a similar formula give the Y rotation at each frame.
So I had another excel for the camera rotation.
Last thing to animate was the clouds. Same process with a calculation of a realistic speed for the clouds.
And again several excel files.
Then all these excel numbers must be convert in readable lines by Terragen 3.
Some functions did that.
When I mean readable by Terragen 3, it is because Terragen 3 can be opened with the Notepad software.
Then it is just some copy + paste operations
The project was in HD 1920 x 1080.
The problem was to keep a quality with a render time as short as possible.
Because of the nearly 1500 frames.
To give you an idea of the challenge 10 minutes of render for a frame means more than 10 days for the project.
So render time has been tested to be reduced as much as possible.
Of course, I forgot to say that I didn't want to use a render farm but only one of my rendering computer.
Artistically, it could have been improved. Flowers are too red for my taste.
Water was not possible here.
I see it more as a technical project using only Terragen 3 (except excel files) and not using a third-party software for animation.
Also I don't know at all the video software, there is not additional view or music.
Thanks for spending time to read my longest post on this forum.
Sorry if all the explanations are not very clear. We'll make that on the non-mother langage effect.
Link to the video :
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdHKkewL2-M (I would advice you to watch it on Youtube website to get the better resolution HD)
David