From the desert to the forest

Started by DocCharly65, January 09, 2015, 05:42:35 AM

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DocCharly65

Yeah Bobby! Some of us would dance on the table with that feature  ;D

j meyer

To my eyes the afternoon version has the most convincing lighting so far.
Keep it up Nils.

KlausK

Hi

To place objects on the terrain exactely I would like to suggest to try this workflow:

01 - copy a lot of Landmark objects along your imaginary animation path
02 - right click as close as possible to the Landmarks position on the terrain and "Copy Coordinates"
03 - then right click again and "Copy altitude".
04 - one more right click to "Copy slope angle".
05 - paste the altitude value into the Landmarks Y-position.
06 - repeat process as often as needed with Landmark objects as many as needed.
07 - put the found values into the appropiate channels of your wheel objects.

Now you can use these Landmarks and their respective values in an on the terrain to animate any object along this path.
Some tweaking and all should be set on a believable track.
This should take out a lot of guess work which is in present "underground" method
and might be faster as well. Since you do not need to render (preview is sufficient).
And a big plus in my opinion is this: if you copy and paste the found values into a txt file
(ordered by Landmark, reasonably named and grouped) you can refer to these values
always later again - as long as you do not alter the terrain, of course.

Hope that helps (hope I did not miss a crucial step...)
Very curious how this all turns out!

cheers, Klaus


/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)

Dune

QuoteThen I pause rendering and watch the ground from UNDER the ground.
Yeah, that's the way I always check my objects' postions on ground, but a lot of work for an animation.

The Landmark idea is a very good one, probably fastest, but Hannes solution didn't work very well in my case. I tried that in my waves animation a while ago, to get one boat bobbing with the waves, but after a few frames suddenly another boat appeared, and dissappeared again a few frames further. Perhaps the instance occurence is related to some Y component, which obviously alters.

The easiest way for the users would be if Matt could implement a 'repopulate or reposition per frame' of a single object. Magic button!

KlausK

I watched the video about exporting a terrain to a vector map just before.
(User-contributed Tutorials / Export Terragen terrains as vector displacement map / digitalguru)

That might be worth a shot as well.
If you look at the terrain object he can get in Mudbox (or any other 3D app I guess) out of the exported map
you would have a terrain to animate your object on in an instance.
Never imported any animation file into a Terragen channel so I am not sure if that works well.

cheers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)