Render to texture

[pagan]

Are we expecting to see a Render to Texture option in the near future?
I know that the quality will be not as good as precedural shaders but I will certainly be a cool feature to have for creating games environments!
Maybe it could export not only color maps but also dispalcement, normal, bumps etc...

[cyphyr]

Use an orthographic camera facing 90deg down, just be aware of where the sun is so you know where your shadows are falling.

Richard

[Oshyan]

Richard's suggestion is going to be your best bet for quite a while. Although the game industry is one possible market, due to the inherent value of TG2's procedurals *in the TG2 rendering engine*, and the degree to which that value is diminished when rasterizing for use in other applications, it's not a direction we will be strongly focusing on. We want to make TG2 interoperable with other applications within reason and for the workflows for which TG2 is strongest. I would not say game environment creation is probably the best use of TG2's strengths. That being said people have done some very interesting and innovative things with both TG2 and TG 0.9, and I'd never want to discourage anyone from going that route on principle. I just wouldn't advise it as the "best" way to go, and consequently it's not something we can put priority on.

- Oshyan

[pagan]

Yes that's a good technique, I have already tried and it works fine.
However would be nice to have a kind of lwo exporter wich also saves maps such as color, bumps, normal, dispacement etc...( for whole scene or section of the scene and for objects present in the scene).
Finally to speed up the process these maps could be related to a sets of UV's automatically generated for use with a low poly version model of the terrain, and other object present within the scene.

I see your point Oshyan but in my point of view the industries are not so separated.
For example I am a content creator for 3d multimedia museum centers.
most of the time the people I am working for they require both, the realtime version and a cinematic one.

I love to do my rendering in TG2 but I also need to produce a realtime version.

So for my cinematic version
- firstly I set up my scene in Terragen
- secondly export bits of terrain that I need to work on for animation in 3ds
- thirdly re-import everything in Terragen without the terrain

For my realtime there is no chance that I will get a fairly similar look without using TG2 texture color etc...
So that I will have to try from the beginning
- re-apply lights etc..
- use the objects exported earlier
- re-texture the terrain
- finally find a solution for populating vegetation or other within 3ds
And still not getting anywhere near.

It is ok to do the first part because the process for creating the cinamatic version is quite straight forward but for the real time one seams a bit pointless
to start everything from the beginning.

Sorry for being so pedantic but  I belive that having the possibility to  "render to texture" for each object present in the scene is the quickest solution.
Also the possibility of exporting population would be a great feature but that I guess  more complicate.

Well just some thoughts...keep up the good work!

[bigben]

There is a visualise normals node, and if you think it through slowly you can probably simulate/approximate the many of the others by reworking the other shaders.

Exporting populations would be technically problematic.  Multiply the size of one obect by the number of objects in a population and you've got some serious disk usage.

[pagan]

Ok I will try visualise normal for textures.
for the population would be nice at least if there was a tool in 3ds(or in other 3d applications) such as Mantania, able to read the procedural population function used by TG2,
but this is not up to TG2 developers.
Or is it not so simple?

[Oshyan]

I appreciate your detailed explanation and I see your point. For your particular use (and perhaps for many others), the export of textures and other data will be important. We do plan to improve import/export capability in the future, so hopefully this can be included. I'm sure it could be useful for many purposes we don't even realize, too.

- Oshyan