TG2 Camera animation issues & 3D stereo

[mcmount]

Hi,

I'm new with TG2, and need help to keep my project going on.
So far I've managed to create procedural planet with continents, terrains with procedural textures and so on. It looks quite ok at this stage. Before tweaking too much I've started to use camera animations. As a built in module it's just impossible to do anything complex with it, and it seems that we have to wait for next release to get better control over the camera.

So, what's the best way to solve this:

I need to do a 1000-2000 frames sequence where we come from space near planet surface and do flyover the terrains. All this needs to be done with 2 cameras (stereo 3d). I'm stuck, please help,

Mcm

[Kadri]

İ have the free version of TG2.İ have no doubt someone who knows TG2 way better then me will guide you in the right direction.
But if  you have not many keyframes can you not change the horizontal position of the render camera 6-7 cm or so and  save this as another projekt? But i don't know how you want to use this 2 x rendered files.

Curious for what is this you want to use?

Cheers.
Kadri.

[mcmount]

Hi Kadri,

I've done animations for 15 years (3d studio, wavefront, Maya) and now I'm doing short film for digital cinema. This production is a demonstration of 3d stereo capabilities and one of the sequences should be really nice fly-animation. It's not commercial, rather educational for production and post production houses here in Europe. Final renders will be full hd with composed 5.1 sounds & effects.

Stereo 3d is not so simple that one could just offset camera a bit. It works if there is no rotations. TG2's built in animation module is way too simple at the moment, curves (calculated positions) between keyframes are not controllable at all. Dummy axis would be cool feature for animation module, where you could hook up multiple things like cameras and other objects.

Mcm

[Kadri]

Yes you are right. İt is not easy in your project to get your desired result. İf there is a way you will hear it here i am sure from the other users or Planetside itself.
Thanks for the info.May it be easy!

Kadri.

[Henry Blewer]

So far, as I know this program, it will render from one camera. So you would need to render the whole again using the second camera. It is possible. To get the banking and rotations correct, you would have to calculate the keyframes of the second camera to compensate for the 'twists'. Terragen 2 does let you select points to aim the camera. If you recorded these point coordinates for each keyframe it would be possible to write a program which would calculate the rotations and banks for the second camera's path. There is a another thread on importing camera paths from 3Ds or Maya. Let me see if I can find it. I'll post the link here.

Found it. This is the link. Hetzen may share what he has learned if you contact him.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7779.0

[mcmount]

EXELLENT!

I allready started coding with VB to get this done fast, but this is awesome! Now I have possibility to compose Maya & TG2 anims in post + built my 3d stereo rig!

Thanks a bunch!

Mcm

[Henry Blewer]

I hope this info was right that I gave you, but I still think it's possible. Ask a land surveyor. 

[TheBlackHole]

Could I use your procedural planet? I can't do one at all. I tried.

[TheBlackHole]

İ have the free version of TG2.İ have no doubt someone who knows TG2 way better then me will guide you in the right direction.
But if  you have not many keyframes can you not change the horizontal position of the render camera 6-7 cm or so and  save this as another projekt? But i don't know how you want to use this 2 x rendered files.

Curious for what is this you want to use?

Cheers.
Kadri.

I know this sounds noobish, but how do you animate? 

[Kadri]

Short answer: You can not animate in the free version. http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/17/29/   Look at "Terragen 2 with Animation".
İf you search you will find many of your questions.

Please make a new topic if you have other questions

Kadri.

[TheBlackHole]

I'll never be able to afford that!  Not even if I saved for it for the next 9000 years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mcmount]

Hi,

Thanks for all the valuable info. I don't see why Maya couldn't be used with free version as well, difference is only in framenumbers where free version renders only frame 0. Ofcourse you don't get motionblur & higher resolution, but basically it should work with external batch scripter.

I've built a very simple 3d Stereo Rig to be used with maya and export the keyframedata to Terragen like explained in http://lowrez.marklowne.com/exportchan.html. I noticed that if positionvalues are high, TG2's rotation gets confused, so I exported translation xyz and rotation data separetly.

At this point it's my first test, so there is no any exchange of any other data between the programs. I'm playing with whole globe, so it's just impossible to import this terraindata to maya.

So here how it works;

1. You need to find every keyframe position inside Terragen and copy the camerainfo manually to Maya (x, y and z and rotations of x, y and z).

2. In Maya, DON'T copy this info directly to CamL or CamR becouse these are controlled by MEL. Copy translations and rotations to Group called CamControl (TG_Pos and TG_Rot-channels) and tweak animation graph + keyframe positions. Bake and export CamR and CamL channels when satisfied. If you need only one camera, set Separation to 0 and export only one cameradata.

Setup is done like this becouse TG2 requires world position for camera. Stereorig requires basically ballShape mathematics for rotations and it's just too complex to do it that way. So dummy objects DR and DL shows camerapositions, becouse MEL kicks in after you touch timeline. World position and rotation of dummyobjects are copied to cameras, so no need for complex math here. When happy, bake the cameras and export the data (one camera at the time).

I tested to export lwo from TG2 and import it as obj to Maya. I needed to rotate Y axis 180 degrees to get the object to right place. Scaling and position was right.

All help for developing and suggestions are welcome !


Mcm