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

[Moose]

Hi goldfarb

Nice to see you around here.

[rcallicotte]

Moose!  You're one to talk.  Where have you been?   

[Moose]

I didn't plan for it... but other things now take up my time leaving no real room for CG (Terragen or Houdini) - but I still enjoy looking-in on what people are producing, of course.

[rcallicotte]

It was good to hear from you.  I've always found your contributions to be very helpful.  Hope you can still work in CG as much as you desire.

[rodpacker1]

Hi Michael/Goldfarb,

thanks a lot for the offer to help.  It looks like I have figured it out myself now and it looks like that if the original camera had a "lookat" set you will have to put that in the CHOPS driven cam again as well otherwise the rotation values will be offset.

Also for the last bit I was mentioning in my initial question where the camera was banking wierd, all I had to do was set the "look at UpVector" to "Use quaternions" and it seems like it's solved now.  I am pretty certain the initial camera didn't have that set so I am quite surprised.

Either way that worked for me.

Again thanks for your offer to help mate!
Highly appreciated
rodpacker

[goldfarb]

glad it's working...

[cyphyr]

12 hours to learn Houdini (the learning one) enough to get an animation chan out of it, recon its possible ...?
The issues seem to be (across the various anim packages) that the further you get from the origin (0,0,0) the more the position data is "rounded". This makes for bad animation far from 0,0,0. Oh well back to the drawing board.....
richard

[goldfarb]

camera animation in Houdini is very easy...
there are tutorials at SESI, 3DBuzz, DigitalTutors and others...and if you've used LightWave you'll have no troubles getting the hang of it...

yeah, far from 0,0,0 things will always get a little tricky - it's a precision error, in Houdini (depending in the scale you're using) anything ~100,000 units and you'll see rounding errors. this is true of just about any application...
there are tricks you can use to get around it but I'm not familiar enough with animating the camera in Terragen to offer any right now...a cool one would be to be able to rotate a planet then you could just animate in Y and the rx/ry/rz

[cyphyr]

yeah, far from 0,0,0 things will always get a little tricky - it's a precision error, in Houdini (depending in the scale you're using) anything ~100,000 units and you'll see rounding errors. this is true of just about any application...

So the animation I have been trying to achieve for the past 2 years is basically impossible. hmmm

I know it makes sense to shave precision of an objects movement when its a long way from the origin but if (as is my situation) your animation starts way off planet, next to another object also way off planet and follows that object in to the planet to more normal animation parameters then is there not a solution to this that avoids multiple renders and tricks and compositing etc...?

...a cool one would be to be able to rotate a planet then you could just animate in Y and the rx/ry/rz

Pretty sure you can now...
richard

[rodpacker1]

Richard,

highly depending on your scene of course, but would proportional down scaling be a possible option to move everything closer to the origin?

Just an idea
cheers
rodpacker

[cyphyr]

Hmm no it wont, thanks tho, it has given me an idea oddly 
Terragens ability to place a sphere in the same place relative to the camera might prove a way forward.
Its not that the number rounding happens at large distances that is the problem, its that it happens differently for objects at slightly different locations so it becomes "challenging" to animate two (or more) objects following similar paths.
More soon, (soon as I get replacement KB) 
?Richard?

[cyphyr]

Hmm no it wont, thanks tho, it has given me an idea oddly 
Terragens ability to place a sphere in the same place relative to the camera might prove a way forward.
Its not that the number rounding happens at large distances that is the problem, its that it happens differently for objects at slightly different locations so it becomes "challenging" to animate two (or more) objects following similar paths.
More soon, (soon as I get replacement KB) 
?Richard?

...a cool one would be to be able to rotate a planet then you could just animate in Y and the rx/ry/rz

Pretty sure you can now...
richard

nah, just cheched and you cant, dont know what the Planet Objects Heading, Elevation and Distance fields are for then...