Null Rotation Bug/Glitch

[Shadow]

Hello!
Im a new to terragen and im facing rotation issues in terragen.
Im exporting my animation from blender as fbx. After importing into terragen the rotation keys are messed up.
i have tried importing into maya and houdini the animation key frames are correct.

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Shadow,

Can you provide us with a little more information regarding the assets you're importing into Terragen?  For example, is the item importing with the incorrect rotation values a camera, light or null object?  Are you importing the items via Terragen's main menu "Import FBX" feature, or directly importing motion to a camera, via the camera's Import features?  

Often in Terragen, you can display the animation pane and select one of the motion channels to see a graphical representation (curve) of the motion that should match the same channel in your other 3D application.  If you notice that the curve is assigned to the wrong channel, you can copy/paste them to the correct channel.

In the "Terragen for VFX" video tutorial series, Parts 3 - 5 discuss importing cameras and other assets into Terragen.  Here's a link to the main video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0dtt4IusJM

[KlausK]

There was this thread once:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,26726.msg266533.html
where this Blender addon was suggested:
https://blendermarket.com/products/better-fbx-importer--exporter

CHeers, Klaus

[Shadow]

Hi Shadow,

Can you provide us with a little more information regarding the assets you're importing into Terragen?  For example, is the item importing with the incorrect rotation values a camera, light or null object?  Are you importing the items via Terragen's main menu "Import FBX" feature, or directly importing motion to a camera, via the camera's Import features? 

Often in Terragen, you can display the animation pane and select one of the motion channels to see a graphical representation (curve) of the motion that should match the same channel in your other 3D application.  If you notice that the curve is assigned to the wrong channel, you can copy/paste them to the correct channel.

In the "Terragen for VFX" video tutorial series, Parts 3 - 5 discuss importing cameras and other assets into Terragen.  Here's a link to the main video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0dtt4IusJM

Hello!
The rotation values are not correct and im importing from the main menu
im importing a null into terragen

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Shadow,

Thanks for the additional information regarding the type of items you're trying to import.

Ideally, make sure that the motion being exported as an FBX from Blender has been baked out for each frame and doesn't have any Euler rotation errors.  That would look like a jump in the motion curve from -180 to 180 degrees over a single frame.  The images below show an example of what this would look like in Lightwave; before and after fixing the rotation, and before being exported as the FBX file.

Can you give us an example of the incorrect rotational values?  For example, what do you expect the Rotation X value to be on frame 1 and what is the value you're getting on that channel when it's imported into Terragen?  Is that value actually on another channel, for example the Rotation Z channel instead of the Rotation X channel?  If it's the later, you can position the timeline to frame 1, select all the Rotation Z keys in the animation pane (Ctl A), copy them (Ctl C), select all the Rotation X keys (Ctl A), then paste (Ctl V) to overwrite the Rotation X valules with the Rotation Z values.

[Shadow]

These are the values im getting

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Shadow,

Thanks for the reference images.  Other than the curves "not matching", it appears that the values in the Terragen animation graph range from -3 to 3 over 300 frames, while the Blender graph shows a range from 0 to 100 over 150 frames.  Can you send me your Blender scene file and Terragen project file to support@planetside.co.uk and I'll take a closer look?

[Shadow]

i have shared both the project files
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1i3NIWAvxL46U_nOYHsYxEes9wcufZo3e?usp=sharing

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi Shadow,

Thanks for sharing your project files.  It appears that the Rotation Y value for the Empty.001 item in the project needs to be flipped in the opposite direction.  There may be an option to do this in Blender during the export process, but here's how to make the adjustment in Terragen.

1. In animation pane, select the item's Rotate Y channel.
2. Click the "Fit to Curve" button at the bottom of the animation pane.
3. Left click in an empty area of the animation pane to set the program's focus on that pane.  A dotted yellow line will appear around the border of the pane to show it has focus.
4. Press "Ctl A" on your keyboard to select all the keyframes.  They will turn orange.
5. In the "Set amount to move keys or scale by percent" input box enter the value "180". 
6. Left click the "Perform an action" button and select "Move by value". 

In the attached image, I added a proxy aircraft model to the project and copied the motion data from the Empty.001 item to it in order to be able to visualize the motion better.  The scale of the proxy model may or may not match what you intended in your project.

I'd also like to offer the following suggestion that you may find helpful when creating master projects in other applications with the intent to export them as FBX files for use in Terragen.  Often these master scenes are complex, and your Blender file is no exception.  There are many items in the scene used for parenting, following and targeting; and this is fine for the master project.  When it comes time to create a file suitable for exporting the FBX file, I add a null item to the project which is set to match the "hero" item's translation, rotation and scale values in world space, then bake that motion into the null item's motion channels.  There might me multiple "hero" items, or cameras or lights.  Then I delete everything in the project except for these hero items and use that as the basis for the FBX file.  This results in a single animation stack to import into Terragen when importing the FBX.

[Shadow]

Thank you for support I will try these settings
Is there any file or preset that you can share to see what setting are used to get realistic look I'm trying but not happy with the results.

[Shadow]

Hi,
i tried these settings but still the rotation of the obj is not correct 

[Matt]

Hi Shadow. If your object is parented to another object, perhaps the FBX isn't exporting the whole transform. Can you bake/flatten/collapse the object hierarchy (sorry I am not familiar with the terminology in Blender), and then export that? Or perhaps there is an option to do that in the FBX exporter?