A non-commercial solution for creating chan files for Terragen.

[Moose]

With the recent posts inquiring about *.chan files and Terragen, I've cleaned up a tool that I've been using for myself in Houdini to get cam data into Terragen. As long as you use it in a non-commercial way it should be fine to use with the free Houdini Apprentice. The tool itself is pretty straight forward to use without any real Houdini knowledge required. Knowing how to animate a camera in another package will stand you in good stead, however. There's a few things in the tool which I was toying with which don't really work, so just ignore them - the main functionality works well though.

I've also created a video demoing the tool's usage and how to do basic camera animation in Houdini. If you sign-up at Vimeo you'll have the option to d/l the video, otherwise it's only available to view as streamed content. It's available in both low-res and HD (113MB / 38min). The low-res version is pretty illegible so HD viewing is recommended.

I forgot to say in the video that you can click the help icon in the top right portion of the tool's parameters pane to view its documentation. Also, I wrongly said that the channel file extension should be chn when I meant to say chan - hopefully that was self-evident though.


Download Houdini Apprentice - http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221
Download the tool - http://www.sidefx.com/exchange/info.php?fileid=485&versionid=485
View or d/l the demo video - http://www.vimeo.com/831399

[Oshyan]

Thanks Moose, this is really helpful and appreciated.

- Oshyan

[Moose]

N.P.

Version 2 uploaded to the SideFX Exchange to account for chan export now working with path based animation (oops ).

[cyphyr]

Thanks Great news Moose. So is Houdini an easy package to use and understand? My background is Lightwave so do you think it would be easy enough to use just for setting up Camera motions?
Richard

[rcallicotte]

Thanks, Moose.  This interesting and helpful.

[Moose]

Thanks Great news Moose. So is Houdini an easy package to use and understand? My background is Lightwave so do you think it would be easy enough to use just for setting up Camera motions?
Richard

Yeah, if you're only interested in animating a camera, there's hardly any learning curve at all. Don't know if you had a chance to look at the video, but in it I show a little camera animation how-to that should be sufficient to get something going with. That, along with the relevant page in the docs, should be all that's needed. The tool itself is very top-level so you wont have to go digging around in Houdini's innards - you don't have to learn Houdini per se, is what I mean.

[gregsandor]

Great tutorial.  Thanks!

[Moose]

Cheers

Now's probably a good time to say that as of Houdini 9.5 (currently in Public Beta release), chan export in Apprentice is now handled by the bclipnc format (Houdini's new binary non-commercial clip file), so the tool in this thread wont work anymore unless you're using Master or Escape. I'm not sure if the same applies for Apprentice HD, but I'd imagine it would seeing as it's also non-commercial (I'll check for sure next week when I upgrade).

[gregsandor]

So the method in the video will no longer work?

[Moose]

Not with H9.5 onwards, nah.

[gregsandor]

We really need the ability to do this within Terragen.  Matt, add handles to our path points please so we can draw some damned curves.

[gregsandor]

Moose, Have you verified that your tool doesn't work in the new version?

[Moose]

Moose, Have you verified that your tool doesn't work in the new version?

Apprentice (free) and Apprentice HD ($99) both use the non-commercial format for chan files as of Houdini 9.5. This means that you cant use the tool with these editions. Using Houdini Master or Escape should be unaffected though.

The tool should still work with a version of Apprentice 9.1 though...

[gregsandor]

Is 9.1 available for downlaod anywhere?  I found only 9.5.

[Moose]

Is 9.1 available for downlaod anywhere?  I found only 9.5.

Yup, from the Downloads menu of the main site.