Script to render out several cameras in T4?

[hipshot]

Hi guys!

Back in the days when I was using T1, I had a script that allowed me to render and save multiple images. It was so I could make a sky box out of it without having to sit and render and save all six images manually.

I think the script actually rotated the camera, rendered and saved.

Is there anyway to automate T4 to do the same?

Thanks in advance.

[Kevin Kipper]

Hi hipshot,

Great question.  First let me point out these two threads about the recent scripts we created for automating a cube map/sky box setup in Terragen and for stitching the rendered images together.

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,31269.0.html
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,31270.0.html

Also we made a blog post about it:
https://planetside.co.uk/blog/support-diaries-cubemaps/

I think the approach to render and save the six images automatically would involve the creation of a batch (.bat) file on a Windows system and then executing it.  The batch file would contain instructions from Terragen's command line rendering feature (see link below).  This would essentially launch Terragen, load the project, then render and save the frames.

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Command_Line_Reference

I believe Alex Pearce at Sim-plates recently shared some of his scripts for remote rendering on our Discord channel.  You may be able to look at his code and extract what would be needed to render the frames.  Here's a link to the video he shared: https://vimeo.com/1112145456/90b67220e2?share=copy

[hipshot]

Thanks for the reply Kevin. A lot of info, it's funny how I searched around google and whatnot and didn't find anything about this.

However, all this python and RPC stuff are too complicated for me. I was looking into the command line stuff, but didn't really find anything with cameras there (I feels all this could be a lot simpler haha)
I also have issues finding the discord, it seems all invites are dead. Are there a some what up to date invite I can use?

edit: Actually, I found out how to render and all from a batch file!

[hipshot]

I forgot, here's the bat file and some info:

Code Select Expand

Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "n.bmp" -r -rendernode "n"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "e.bmp" -r -rendernode "e"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "w.bmp" -r -rendernode "w"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "s.bmp" -r -rendernode "s"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "up.bmp" -r -rendernode "u"
Terragen.exe -p "path\jap.tgd" -o "dn.bmp" -r -rendernode "d"

Just paste this into a clean bat file and run, make sure you fill in the correct path. For some reason I couldn't do just the file w/o path, but this works as well.

In the scene, create 6 cameras, set each one of them to the correct rotation and make sure the coordinations and quality settings are exactly the same, these are the rotations you need:

N = 0 0 0
E = 0 90 0
W = 0 180 0
S = 0 270 0
UP = 90 0 0
DN = -90 0 0

Then make 6 render nodes, connect each one of them to the corresponding camera, make sure all render nodes have the same quality settings. BTW, cameras and render nodes can't have the same name for some reason, so just name the cameras to something else. In my case I named the cameras the full length name and the render nodes the short version.



Save. Quit. Run the bat file. It will run silently w/o opening the program, you can set it during sleep or whatever.

This is the result, stitched in photoshop. It's a sky fox my quake 3 level. This is a shrunk down version, in reality, each image is 1024^2, so it will look very crisp and clear in game.