I decided to animate my old man scene. What an undertaking!!!
Animating the eyes was the first task. Since Terragen has no binding feature (yet!), I had to place each eye by hand with the pivot set to the centers of them, exactly where they had to be and animate it in TG.
Then I had the idea of somehow animating the face. To do that I made one single object by combining the head and all hair objects, which had 364MB in the end. I then created a few facial expressions as morph targets. I didn't use any fancy stuff like facial rigs. I just pushed around some vertices with a falloff selection. No simple task at all. Far away from perfect, but I was quite happy.
Afterwards I created a point cache animation of this and exported a pc2 file, which I then wanted to convert to an MDD file I can use in TG. That's when it started to get problematic. My first try was a 200 frames animation, which resulted in a 4GB (!) pc2 file I wanted to convert with the free pc2MDD app. This app (which works perfectly when the size of the file isn't too big) refused to do what I want and so I reduced it to a 100 frames animation. Still didn't work. I then decided to "record" only every second frame as a point cache file. So it's a point cache of 50 frames for a 100 frames animation (still 900MB), which makes the animation double speed and half the duration. Not good, but at least pc2MDD converted it. So I decided to render out a 50 frames animation and stretch it to 100 frames in postwork afterwards.
Even with this MDD file and after converting the obj to a tgo my machine and Terragen struggled to render it in one go. A lot of times after a few frames Terragen was still somehow alive, showing the time in the render process, but was stuck. I had to continue a lot of times by hand, until everything was finished. Originally it was rendered in 800 X 450 px, but I used Topaz Labs to make it Full HD.
In After effects I added some chromatic aberration, stretched the animation in time and added some camera movement.
I'm really done now...
