Automatic Panoramas?

[Elegy]

Is there a way to set up Terragen 2 to render an image, then rotate the camera by 50 degrees and render again (several times) automatically? It's very frustrating having to come back to the computer and manually start a new render. I'd ideally like to go to bed one night, wake up eight hours later and find five saved images, the cameras in each rotated 50 degrees apart.

[Tangled-Universe]

I think this can be done using the command line render.
You could create a seperate tgd-file for each camera angle/rotation and then create a batche-file with command line instructions to render the tgd-files.

There's also a topic in this section of the forum about a render-utility:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2816.0

This could be helpful as well.

Martin

[Elegy]

Thank you, I'll have a look at the utility. How do you access the command line, and how do you use it?

[Tangled-Universe]

The command-line function is only available for registered users.
Honestly I don't know how it works. I've never worked with it before.
The way I would set up a panorama is to increase the fov in the camera-setup and render the image at 16:9 or 2:1 ratio, something like that.
For ways to use the command-line renders, and all other questions, I'd advice to use the search function. The forums already contain a tremendous amount of information on almost any subject.
(n.b. sometimes the search function doesn't return results surprisingly, performing the search again will often return results (don't know why, but it works for me here))

[Elegy]

Unfortunately I only have the free version so I guess command line options are out. I'm encountering errors with the render utility as well - am I correct in assuming this is because it requires me to have the full version?

I just ran a search and nothing particularly relevant has come up that I can see. I'll carry on searching though, maybe I'll hit on something.

[Tangled-Universe]

There is a commandline documentation file in the Technology Preview install directory under /docs/command_line.txt

What kind of problems do you encounter with render utility?
The free preview is restricted to render-sizes up to 800x600, AA 3, GI 3/3 and max. 3 populations.

[Elegy]

There is a commandline documentation file in the Technology Preview install directory under /docs/command_line.txt

What kind of problems do you encounter with render utility?
The free preview is restricted to render-sizes up to 800x600, AA 3, GI 3/3 and max. 3 populations.

The only files I have in that folder are "changes.txt" and "free-imagelicense.txt". I'm also aware of the restrictions - I'm trying to create a panorama by rendering a 3x2 array of 800x600 images (the largest I can render). The render utility says all six images failed to render and when I check the command prompt, I notice that it keeps saying the path specified could not be found.

[Tangled-Universe]

Well I guess the utility utilizes the commandline option to work.

So the only option and also officially supported way of doing this is to buy a license 

[Elegy]

Well I guess the utility utilizes the commandline option to work.

So the only option and also officially supported way of doing this is to buy a license 

Unfortunately I don't have £100 to spare right now so I guess I'll be manually rendering 800x600 images for a while . Maybe I could find a way of physically doing it. Perhaps creating a macro that moves the mouse cursor over the "Render" button and clicks it every two hours. Frustrating. There must be a legal way of getting around this.

[bigben]

For the free version I'd use a zen approach...

In order to feel that the effort of moving the camera and clicking on the render button is not that much of an effort, you merely need to increase the complexity of the scene so that it takes a loooong time to render. Simply return to your computer once a day to move the camera and render the next tile

Users of the Deep version can set up a batch file to render separate TGD files via the commandline.... Deep + Animation users can set up multiple camera positions in the one TGD to render several panoramas in a single scene.  There has to be some benefit/incentive to forking out the extra money