animation help

Started by 3Dev, January 21, 2009, 02:24:33 PM

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3Dev

I've been trying to find these rivers in a usgs data set, which is very difficult in tg2. there is several reason that find river like areas in a data set is hard todo, but two stick out, One water is always flat so the moving water which makes up the bulk of river doesn't exists I can only see the valley's fill up in the flat areas of the river. then two rivers only exists in valley like structure in the data so I have to wait for my preview to calculate enough micro triangles to even pic up a hint of the data, if i change the water level or move the camera I have to wait all over again. So I figured Hey if I Animate the water level I can just pull out the camera take a nap while its calculating and then from the animation I could pick the best water level and location to do my still shot rendering.

So i did a quick search and found several reference on this forum saying I just have to click the "S(curve) a" buttons next to the value i want to animate, and click "set animation key" however my "S(curve) a" buttons do not have that option, instead they only let me "import from text file". Im sure I just missed something stupid here any idea? we have the deep version of tg2 and its fully updated. This should be a fairly simply operation. the animation isnt going to be used for a final product i just need a way of seeing all my microtriangles at differnt water levels quickly.

RArcher

Not entirely sure what you are trying to do.  If all you are looking to do is locate where the rivers are, the easiest way I can think to do it would be to either overlay a usgs topo map, a satellite map, or some vector based data on top of your heightfield.  From here you can then either mask out the rivers using an image map, or just carefully trace the rivers using the painted shader.

For information on how to overlay GIS data see this help topic:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4559

To do any sort of animation you need the Deep version plus animation.

3Dev

thanks for the advice. I didn't realize that there were so many different versions of the beta test. I knew we had bought the commercial license but I guess there is another license to make my time slider and "s(curve) a" buttons useful.

Oshyan

There are currently 2 commercial licenses for TG2 - Terragen 2 "Deep" and Terrgen 2 "Deep with Animation". The latter version is necessary in order to get animation functionality. Upgrades are available. Contact registrations AT planetside.co.uk for further details if interested.

As for finding your river levels, you might have better luck (and faster results) in a 3rd party heightfield editor like World Machine or Global Mapper. Once your rivers are identified you can most likely export a mask to use in TG2 to outline the rivers.

- Oshyan

3Dev

actually I found that i can only find them if I turn off a default setting? its in the height field under displace, I have to turn off the flatten surface first check mark, I'm not certain why this is, normally that default box gives me excellent results.Strangely enough by turn that off also seems to lower the height differential by nearly a 1000m. so what is normally at a height of say 1500 would be at a height of 500. but i got the picture I wanted and that's all that matters to me. thanks for all the advice tho.