Canyon animation

[Kranky]

Hello,

I created a small (30 seconds) test-animation. I wanted to test the animation system - I only moved the camera. But this was really hard. I set the start- and endpoint. The camera flew directly to the endpoint trought the canyon walls. Then I set more keys and the interpolation of the curve does not work correct anymore - the camera starts panning around and I cannot control it
So this animation has got only 2 or 3 keyframes.

www.jens-bringewatt.de/videos/canyon.zip (XVid codec)

I rendered on a AMD 2,3GHz dual core and the rendertime of the animation (750 frames, 640x480) was 363 hours for each core.

In the near future I will only render still images

[cyphyr]

Great work, I love seeing the reflections on the water.
Richard

[zionner]

Yeah, I agree.

There is a nice Colour to the water which makes it...kinda diffrent..Good diffrent!

[old_blaggard]

I really like the scene, although the camera could have used a bit more speed .  Would you mind telling us what the detail you used was?

[dhavalmistry]

good job.....although in the beginning you can see a light change in the fractal on the right side....but thats not your fault.....I have seen that in lot of TG2 animations.....hopefully planetside can fix this in next update....

did you use transparancy on water???....couldnt quite tell.....

[Seth]

very good job ! i like it !

[efflux]

Worth the render time just to see what TG2 can do. In my opinion TG2 animation is superb. the realism shines through. I like the way the camera moves slowly. This slow speed makes the canyon seem very large. Great work.

[Oshyan]

The results here are actually quite nice. I agree that the slow camera movement heightens the sense of scale. I think the lighting is a bit dull, but otherwise it's a great scene.

The camera controls and interpolation in TG2 definitely leave much to be desired right now. We do plan to improve this in the future, however it's also worth keeping in mind that sophisticated animation tools already exist in other applications and they can be used to setup an animation and export to TG2 in the .chan format. Obviously not everyone has the luxury or knowledge to do this, but to really get the best animated motion it will probably be preferable.

- Oshyan

[Kranky]

Thanks for your feedback

The render detail was 0.5 and anti aliasing at 4.

@Oshyan: Can you tell me, which programs create .chan files? Are there any freeware or open source tools?

[Oshyan]

The only freeware/open source tool I could think of that *might* support it would be Blender, but I don't know for sure if it does.

- Oshyan

[zionner]

I'm looking through blender now,

I cant see any support yet, the closest thing i can see is a possible way to play your animations through blender.

[overlordchuck]

Woah.  Very, very, very nice.

[sjefen]

Good work. Nice to see some more animations from Terragen 2

[cyphyr]

So far all I could find that exports the .chan file format are Houdini, Maya and Nuke, all a little pricey. I've posted over at CGTALK to see if anyone there can shed some light on an alternative.
Richard

[HooDoo]

Very nice one! Was the water also animated ie has the water animated waves or it just seems moving?