How does TG Animate / Manual Animation

Started by WAS, May 06, 2018, 07:32:51 PM

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WAS

I was curious in trying to attempt to create a 10 frame aniamtion of my fire once I have it dialed in. The problem is, I do not own TG. I cannot animate.

I was curious how Terragen animates noise? Is it panning the noise, or does the noise actually change per frame? If it is panning, I assume it would be possible to manually pan the noise input per render for a frame?

luvsmuzik

#1
If you move the camera or light source the flame with will flicker or change. You can animate noise, as others do with water with foam, etc.
When you move clouds in a scene, the noise reacts to light position as well. Shadows internal of clouds also react.

I was also going to experiment with a cloud flame by raising and lowering cloud depth. Because seldom do flames in a nature environment stay static.

WAS

I see. I'm trying to figure out how animation is actually occurring within TG. Is the noise panning or actually animating in another way. At least for clouds.

Oshyan

It's not so much a matter of how TG "animates" anything, but how *you* choose to animate something in TG. ;)

If you animate a camera and nothing else in the scene, the flames (or other fractal-based phenomena) should *not* change (except in terms of specific noise pattern which is just due to random sampling and is a render detail issue, not an actual change to the underlying noise function, e.g. the flame pattern). However, noises are mostly defined in, or "anchored" in, World Space by default. So if you move the object/shader that is using a noise function as input, the *object* is moving *relative* to the noise function (which stays static), and therefore the pattern changes. Basically the "slice" of the noise function that is being visualized by e.g. a cloud node changes based on where that cloud node is positioned and sampling the noise in that location. Unless, of course, "Move textures with cloud" is enabled.

So with all that in mind, you can animate noise functions in a wide variety of ways to achieve different effects. You can Translate in X or Z, which would keep the *shapes* the same but simply move them horizontally. You could also Translate in Y which in most cases gives the appearance of an "evolving" animation where the shapes slowly change to other shapes. This is because you are always seeing either a 2D projection of the noise function - like a "slice" - as in the case of a noise function on a surface, or you are seeing a limited area volumetric representation, as in the case of a cloud layer. In either case when you move the noise function relative to this slice or finite volume, the noise function appears to change because the "slice" you are taking is moving through the 3D noise function itself and the shapes vary throughout the function (which is what makes it a 3D noise function basically).

You can also animate with "4D Noise", which is a relatively newer function which actually *does* attempt to literally animate the noise along the 4th (time) dimension. So you get "evolving" shapes with this too, but the shapes are *actually* changing, rather than just the result of seeing a different part of the noise function.

You can also animate any other setting of a noise function and get useful and interesting results. Warping, scale, etc, etc. So there is no one simple answer to this.

- Oshyan

WAS

Okay, this all makes a lot of sense. So it is possible.

Quote from: Oshyan on May 07, 2018, 04:44:22 PM
You can also animate with "4D Noise", which is a relatively newer function which actually *does* attempt to literally animate the noise along the 4th (time) dimension. So you get "evolving" shapes with this too, but the shapes are *actually* changing, rather than just the result of seeing a different part of the noise function.

This is what I was afraid, but though was maybe native behavior, good to know it's a setting. Didn't even know about this.

Thanks for this information, so it's definitely possible, in multiple ways. Thanks a lot. I think I may try a flame animation at some point after i finish the galaxy background.