Another ocean

[Hannes]

Late reply: the first thing I learned in CG was: NEVER render out as a video! Always render single frames. Imagine you render a long animation for days, and during the last frame your computer crashes. Everything will be gone. If you render out in single frames, you'll only have to render the last frame.

However, here is another try. I changed some of the displacement settings and reduced the color falloffs to make it look a bit more natural.

[DocCharly65]

Has almost a hypnic effect on me watching that! Great!

[Dune]

Great update! Very realistic, I believe those movements.

[DannyG]

Impressive update Hannes

[WAS]

This is really well done. Great work! I wonder if there is anyway to combat the ribboning effect and make it stretch out instead of pinch in.

[bobbystahr]

last one is excellent and loops nicely in VLC player

[WAS]

Late reply: the first thing I learned in CG was: NEVER render out as a video! Always render single frames. Imagine you render a long animation for days, and during the last frame your computer crashes. Everything will be gone. If you render out in single frames, you'll only have to render the last frame.

However, here is another try. I changed some of the displacement settings and reduced the color falloffs to make it look a bit more natural.

To be clear, a per-frame basis is each frame to disk, but than it takes those frames and compiles them for you. From what I understand Terragen outputs TIFF (or archaic BMP), meaning if you don't have a enterprise/commercial software you first need to go in and re-encode every frame before compiling in most available/open-source sequencers. TG handling it itself with it's native TIFF format would be handy. Most software offers this, with the temp frames available.

P.S. Would love to see a ship on these waves, would be a cool test.

[Oshyan]

TIFF is actually super widely supported, it's not "enterprise" at all. I find PNG to actually be less widely supported *in video editing software* than TIFF, probably because PNG is more of a web-oriented format.

We're very unlikely to add any video compression and container output functionality in the future, it's extraneous to what Terragen needs to be good at. I admit it's convenient, but dev time is better focused on core functionality given the many free options for video compression.

- Oshyan

[WAS]

Did you ever go anywhere with this project? As someone noted it would be nice to see that roam setup animated on this.

TIFF is actually super widely supported, it's not "enterprise" at all. I find PNG to actually be less widely supported *in video editing software* than TIFF, probably because PNG is more of a web-oriented format.

We're very unlikely to add any video compression and container output functionality in the future, it's extraneous to what Terragen needs to be good at. I admit it's convenient, but dev time is better focused on core functionality given the many free options for video compression.

- Oshyan

I really meant PNG for still outputs in general. Just to share an example image from TG on the web, etc, you need to go into a third party software just to export the still.

As for video, you still misunderstood. Lossless raw video is not compressed in any way. It's a sequence of stills to be easily imported into editing software. As noted you usually still have all the temp frames too.

That really just means TG has one little extra option, a few hundred lines, to export a sequence from a completed set without needing another software, and as noted, when not on commercial softwares such as using free editing tools just for a animation with little post, you often need to go through a sequencer tool comprising a few hundred KB or MB tool to than edit in said free software.

This isn't a compression algorithm or serious time spent in exporting, as I'm sure or hope you are awarez sequencing a raw video is pretty fast. Often can be done in real-time and how desktop capturing software works. Compiling usually a magnitude faster.

[dorianvan]

Great job. 
Question. Can water like this (horizontal) be rotated 90 degrees so it looks like this but standing up? I'm wondering about walls of water biblical like and at the top, kind of rounded over to meet the regular horizontal water. Possible?

[Oshyan]

You can apply a water or glass shader to any object or surface, so yes almost any shape is possible. Whether it would look realistic and render with correct lighting is another question, but it's worth a try.

- Oshyan

[Hannes]

Great job.
Question. Can water like this (horizontal) be rotated 90 degrees so it looks like this but standing up? I'm wondering about walls of water biblical like and at the top, kind of rounded over to meet the regular horizontal water. Possible?

Maybe a bit like this?
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25360.0.html

[digitalguru]

Sorry to go off-topic on the oceanic nature of this thread, but I  thought I'd add my two cents to the sequence export comments

That really just means TG has one little extra option, a few hundred lines, to export a sequence from a completed set without needing another software, and as noted, when not on commercial softwares such as using free editing tools just for a animation with little post, you often need to go through a sequencer tool comprising a few hundred KB or MB tool to than edit in said free software.

I doubt if it would be as simple as a few hundred lines of code, and Planetside's focus should obviously be developing landscape tools not video editing.

As Hannes mentions, you would never want to export an animation from a program such as Terragen (or any other content creation program for that matter) as a video file, especially when the render times for a frame can run into hours. Even at the major VFX houses a frame can fail, then it's no problem to go back and fix problem frames and quick composite the result.

TIFF is actually super widely supported, it's not "enterprise" at all. I find PNG to actually be less widely supported *in video editing software* than TIFF, probably because PNG is more of a web-oriented format.

Tiff support (and even PNG) is in pretty much 99 percent of any programs out there, though for professional work OpenExr has become the standard, though this is overkill for rendering test sequences at home however. I'd go with 8 bit tiff for preview/test renders.

There are great free/open source programs with a plethora of features that can handle previews for you:

DJV View:
http://djv.sourceforge.net/index.html
Will play back any image sequence you can throw at it, easy and simple to use.

Natron:
https://natrongithub.github.io/
An open source compositor, which on a very basic usage can render the sequence as a mp4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ytj1S7_vw

Davinci Resolve
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0Kvn1uzD5AIVyLHtCh2AkAk6EAAYASAAEgLeTvD_BwE
In this context, a bit like using a shotgun to kill a fly , but the free version can easliy take a sequence and render to mp4 - it even has a preset to automatically upload to YouTube and Vimeo. It has an awesome amount of features you can grow into.

The Gimp:
https://www.gimp.org/
A free image editing program for simple file conversions. I'd aways convert a TG still frame render to JPEG for submission to the web, just to keep the file sizes down.

XNview
https://www.xnview.com/en/
A great image browser and can batch convert files. It will also read OpenExr and HDR files which a lot of browsers currently don't.

Affinity Photo:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
Not free, but at about $40 a definte Photoshop contender - it will even edit 32bit files with a full range of tools (for heightfields) which even Photoshop currently can't do.

I will agree with WAS on a modified point that it would be very useful to have JPEG as an output format, which would negate a conversion for the web. Though in all the cases mentioned above -jpeg conversion and sequence to mp4  are very quck and easy processes to do.

[jDglgmut]

Sorry I gotta make an account to defend such nonsense.

Course it can few hundred lines of code. Actually less. All you are doing is sequencing the still images TG has already rendered and exported. It's just a process after that completion. I do program, if you didn't know.

Ironically, most software has sequencing and exporting of video, and used all the time. Blender, Cinema4D, Houdini, etc. There is no excuse but lazyness and fighting the community. You doing things with extra steps in an outdated fashion is fine, but there are better ways. TG needing a third party option is not cool of a commercial software. Even just to export a image for conferencing.

It seems people are either not aware of what others use in other software they use, or they don't use much other software.

Again lossless raw videos, are not mp4, not compressed, and just a sequence of raw stills. All it is taking a step out. It's the same thing programs do when you import a sequence to be able to even play it back without swapping images from disk and creating unnecesssary lag.

And if we don't understand lossless uncompressed video sequences, why are we arguing it?

[digitalguru]

Sorry I gotta make an account to defend such nonsense.

Course it can few hundred lines of code. Actually less. All you are doing is sequencing the still images TG has already rendered and exported. It's just a process after that completion. I do program, if you didn't know.

Fair enough - if you program, the SDK is available for Terragen, maybe you could write a plugin?

In the meantime, in the absence of such a feature, the above were suggestions that users might find useful.