For my final trick, I want to share another way of putting these Python scripts for Terragen at your fingertips.
On Black Friday I was seduced by an advertisement for the TourBox Elite.
I'd never really seen one before, it's basically a little box with lots of cool buttons and dials. Each mechanical widget can be assigned to perform a specific action on a software-by-software basis. The software for the TourBox even ships with presets for programs like Photoshop, Blender, Gimp, and many more. It automatically detects a switch between software packages and swaps button assignments accordingly. Apparently editors use this tool a lot, by-passing the normal keyboard and mouse workflow. The general term for these devices is a Creative Console.
I got to thinking, wouldn't this be cool to use in Terragen. For example, I usually work in Terragen at my monitor's full resolution on a decent sized screen and always felt a little put out when I needed to scrub through the timeline because I had to move my mouse so far across the screen. I hoped that I could somehow use one of the dials on the Tourbox to handle this task. And it works, mostly. I still have to click the timeline in order to focus the program on that area, but then I can use one of the dials to move the timeline to the left or right. It's pretty cool, and I'm sure that as my muscle memory gets used to using the gizmo it will get much faster.
You can assign any existing keyboard shortcut that's been defined in a program to any button or dial on the TourBox. Currently, I've got Terragen's Measuring tool assigned to one button, and the Animation Panel on another one. Clicking either of those buttons immediately brings up that feature in Terragen.
Both those examples are pretty much things you can already do with the keyboard and mouse, but here's where it starts getting interesting. You can create macros for the TourBox, and run them in sequence like you might do with Photoshop's Actions. Of course this partially depends on the commands made available by the software package. But, you can also make your own macro which might be as simple as creating a name for the macro and telling it to run a particular Python script that's on your hard drive. Presto! Your Python script is now one button click away anytime you need it.
But wait there's even more! You can create menus too.
A "TourMenu" can list all of the macros you've defined; one for each of your Python scripts. Then you assign the TourMenu to one of the buttons on the Tourbox. When you press the button the menu opens up and you can use the Tourbox dials to select and run individual macros. Basically, every script you have is now at your fingertips. You could create a TourMenu for your Python "Utility" scripts, your Python "Cloud" scripts, etc. or one TourMenu for all your scripts. I'm hoping that future versions of the Tourbox software will allow a TourMenu to call another TourMenu, so you could create a sort of cascading menu system.
Here's a link to the TourBox web site:
https://www.tourboxtech.com/en/And there you have it. Two ways to increase your productivity workflow in Terragen by being able to access your Python scripts quicker and in one place.
