Terragen Deep+Animation questions

[DDare]

Hello, I've been playing with the technical preview, and I think it's awesome,
I'm about to begin a project and I've been testing the preview to get sure it will do the job. There are a few points I'm not really sure about, I've ben looking the forums and I got some answers, but not all of them.

The project is the evolution of pangea untill nowadays earth. Planets can be done, and with satellite images  today's earth can be easily done, the problem is pangea, laurasia, Gondwana...In addition the evolution must be animated, continents must split and collapse ( I'm afraid it's almost suicide   )


The questions are:

Animation can be done in Deep+Animation, but can I animate fractal textures? or import an animated clip to use as mask?
  Have already been implemented specular channels?


I'll keep searching the forum, but I need an answer ASAP,

thanks in advance

[Mandrake]

Sounds like big big project, good luck. Would this be from orbit?
Oh and don't forget, the moon was a lot closer back then.

[rcallicotte]

Animation can be done in Deep+Animation, but can I animate fractal textures? - Maybe.  This is a pretty broad question.

or import an animated clip to use as mask? - You might think about combining software applications to do this, rather than make TG2 your central app.

Have already been implemented specular channels? - No.

[Cyber-Angel]

@ DDare

Take following as rules of thumb:

1. If a search leads to no results that dose not mean that the question has not been asked before: try reformatting you search quarry and try again; repeat this until you have tried all possible permutations of the quarry that you can think of if at the end of that time you still have nothing come up as a result of your search then feel free to post.

2. Feel free to ask for what ever features you'd like to add to Terragen in the future weather they'll be accepted or not is another matter, I've learned for experience that what you ask for and what your likely to get are two vary different beasts all together.

All that aside, welcome to the site.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel           

[DDare]

Thanks for the quick answers, I've been given a few extra days, I'll check other post to find more answers



anyway I'm falling in love with T2....


*edit* Mandrake: It won't be an orbiting shot, , and thanks for the moon advice

[PG]

As far as splitting the continents, you can draw out masks with something like photoshop and apply it as an image map, use a lot of blending, then lower the blending setting as the animation passes. This (should) give the illusion that the land is slowly splitting, to give yourself more control you can then change the mask at a frame in the animation, for example to change the direction a particular continent is moving in, using the same blending technique. This is just a theory though, Harvey B knows loads more than me about masks so he's a really good person to ask.

[DDare]

Thanks PG, I'll check Harvey B's post,

we are already building the maps, the process we planned is close to the one you describe, if it can be done in TG2 it's great!

[Matt]

You can use an image sequence in the Image Map Shader if you format them something like this:

imagename0001.tga
imagename0002.tga
...

and then in the image map shader refer to them as follows (manually edit the filename in the shader's parameter window):

imagename%04d.tga

There is currently a bug which means this will not work if you render the sequence from within Terragen (it only loads the first frame), but it should work if you render individual frames from the command line (see win_command_line.txt or mac_command_line.txt in the docs folder).

This should work with any image formats that TG can read (.tga is just used as an example). However, before going any further I would recommend running some tests with some simple proxy images to make sure TG animates as expected. I'm afraid I haven't used this feature in a long time.

Matt

[bigben]

Another good snippet from Matt

If (OK it's a big if) you're creating intermediate images using a morphing program that can be controlled via commandline you could also create a new mask image with the same filename between rendering individual frames (also via commandline). Saves on disk space if that is a critical consideration and you can edit your key images right up to the final render time.