ANIMATION - Script for Lightwave?

[silviotoledo]

I am planning to do an animation in lightwave so I asked a friend of mine to create a script wich writes a TXT file with the camera coordinates wich Terragen could import.

Is there any TXT with animated camera usefull for terragen as sample?
Is there any sample about how to import camera files?

I see Terragen also have an LWO export for terrain, I guess it's a lightwave object, so was terragen planned to work with lightwave?

[silviotoledo]

This friend will write a lightwave Plugin to import and export Terragem camera animation. He did it in the past to the old terrain generator VISTA PRO. Any animation script camera sample in this forum? please send me the link.

[Oshyan]

Terragen 2 is compatible with the NUKE .chan format for motion data interchange. The specs should be freely available online (I think). He might also look at simply writing values directly into the xml of the .tgd file as it is fairly easy to understand and modify.

- Oshyan

[MooseDog]

also search this forum.  there've been numerous threads about the .chan format, including it's direct format.  i should think lscript can easily write such a .txt file that you could manually re-name to .chan.

tg2 works really well w/lw.  the .lwo exporter works thusly:  for a heightfield, it creates a grid of 12 or 16 objects, all ready and lined up to be dropped in layout.  in fact, the .lws is created as well.  from there, animate at will!

[silviotoledo]

Hi Oshyan

My friend Makslane is working on the script to transfer camera data from lightwave to Terragen. As I see, Terragen can export the Terrain as LWO file, so we can animate the camera in lightwave and the plugin would be usefull to transfer the camera coordinates frame by frame to Terragen.

Once Terragen imports camera position as a TXT file, is it possible terragen read all the camera positions for each frame on that entrance? How is the TXT file for a multiple frame format? Is there a sample? Or frame advanced can't be read from camera  TXT files?

Silvio Toledo

[Oshyan]

Import of animation data isn't available in the free version, which I believe you are working with. The free version can import settings from a simple .txt file, but it will only read the first frame. In the Deep + Animation version the txt import is replaced by .chan import, and that's what you would use for getting your motion data into TG2.

- Oshyan