New to terragen, and having trouble finding out how things work...

[Jianaran]

Hi everyone. I've just started using terragen, and am having a lot of trouble finding out how to use it. The few tutorials I have found mainly proceed along the lines of "do this, then that, then that...", and leave you with a nice image but no idea how you got there or how to apply what you've used to your own stuff. I'd also like to know how to add objects. A few tutorials I've seen jump from no objects to a forest, for example, and explain this by saying "I'll now add in some pine trees, from Walli's pack" or something similar. Problem is, this is kind of hard if one has no idea how to add objects at all in the first place. If someone could tell me how this works I'd be much obliged

I realise that this is kind of a hard post to respond to, but are there any decent tutorials around that actually explain what you're doing instead of providing a recipe for an image?

[domdib]

Have you tried this one? http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7733.0

[Jianaran]

Yes, and that's exactly what I mean by a recipe, not a tutorial.
I'll take a quote from it:

Now let's add some finer detail: Click the Add Terrain button again and select > Displacement
Shader > Power fractal v3. You'll see that it's installed under Main Terrain Features in the scene
build window. Click on the new power fractal and change its name to "Smaller Terrain Features".
Give it a Seed value of 53089, change the Feature scale to 50. Click the Displacement tab and
change the Displacement amplitude to 10, the Disp offset to 3.7, Disp roughness to 0.7125, and
Spike limit to 0.5. Check Continue spike limit. Now click the Tweak noise tab and increase the
Noise variation to 1.5, and the Buoyancy from variation to 0.5.

OK, so I added some finer detail... But how? What did altering the feature scale do? What's the disp offset? How does a spike limit work, and what does continuing it change?
You see what I mean? I've been through this tutorial, but at the end of it I don't feel like I've learnt much about how to use the program itself to do what I want it to do. I've made a lot of shaders and changed their parameters, but without any real idea of what I was doing apart frmo following orders.

[Henry Blewer]

I have some projects going, but I'll have a good tutorial posted on this on 12/12/2009 for you. It will take some time to write and not skip things.

[domdib]

Well, did you consider entering some different values from the ones suggested, to see what effect it has? Also, there's no getting around the fact that a program as powerful as TG2, which has so many variables that can be altered, does take some time to get comfortable with.

[Jianaran]

Thank you very much. I don't want to sound whiny and demanding, as I fully I realise that tutorials written are done in the writers' own time, and take a looong time to do well. I'm looking forward to seeing your tutorial!
domdib: Yes, I did do. But often the results are subtle or unpredictable, especially when mucking around with node networks. I had a fake stones shader linked into a surface shader, but when I reversed their order I somehow flattened the terrain (they were both well below the terrain fractal). Stuff like that is hard to work out without decent documentation, which seems hard to find.

[Seth]

I think you should use the search function of the forum to get familiar with the basic stuff of tg2.
Your post is a hard one to answer indeed because there are so many parameters in TG2 that it is difficult to explain everything and how things work without knowing what you already know and tried...
if you tweak some values in your powerfractals, i suggest you to try huge changes, so they won't be subtle
I really think the answers of all the questions you ask are already written on the forum so once again, i truely encourage you to use the search fonctions... and if you don't understand something, ask again... ^^

[Seth]

btw, jumping to no object to a forest is just a matter of clicking on adding a population
and speaking for myself, it is easier to add a population than a single object (because the single object is harder to place).
anyway, I hope you'll find everything you need in the so many previous thread, as it is full of information for a newbie (like we all were), and remember that we all learned from here and from each others !

courage !


edit : maybe, even if you don't like the "follow order" kind of tutorial, you could try the one I did too : http://www.nwdanet.com/tech-articles/11-wilderness
usually, people learn from doing stuff again and again... changing this or that each time to truely understand the way TG2 works

[Jianaran]

Thanks, I saw that tutorial before but will go through it properly now. One question, though: near the end you say that you add some trees. OK, cool, but how did you do that? How does one take a .tgo and turn it onto a population with proper spacing etc?
Thanks for the replies everyone

[neuspadrin]

Thanks, I saw that tutorial before but will go through it properly now. One question, though: near the end you say that you add some trees. OK, cool, but how did you do that? How does one take a .tgo and turn it onto a population with proper spacing etc?
Thanks for the replies everyone

on objects, you hit the add population -> tgo.

Then you move the population created to where you want.(careful not to touch the additional object representation for that population located right under it).  As for scale/spacing, theres fields on the population node that are quite obviously labeled about spacing and such.  For this you generally will want to try populating and clicking the preview populations checkbox, and just keep modifying scale/spacing until it looks natural.  It's hard to determine due to differences in model sizes, scene sizes, etc.

I went over adding objects and moving them in my video tutorials:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Beginner_Video_Tutorials_by_Neuspadrin#Part_5_-_Objects

mainly terragen is a lot of playing with numbers, and slowly learning what everything is capable of.  take a look through demo scenes offered in the download section (nwda default scene and dandel0's default scene are good), also any tgc (terragen clip files) are good to look at and learn from.  

It's hard to make a tutorial that covers what everything does because well.... theres about a million different variations of things you can do with each mode just have to kinda play with them.  just takes some patience and learning.  

Terragen is kinda a easy to learn but hard to master kinda software.

and hmm i need to update video tutorials to use some of the newer features and better work flow that ive learned.  and i need to get a new mic. heh.

[Seth]

object tab => Add object => Population => tgo reader for a population (or obj reader if your object is .obj)

[buzzzzz1]

In addition to Seth here's a couple of Tutorials that might help.  http://en.tgblog.de/?p=28 and http://en.tgblog.de/?p=30

[Seth]

In addition to Seth here's a couple of Tutorials that might help.  http://en.tgblog.de/?p=28 and http://en.tgblog.de/?p=30

oh yes !
I really liked those tutorials.
check the other ones on this blog, they are really usefull.

[tempaccount]

I think we're all familiar with this problem - it doesn't help a lot there isn't a single place for the tutorials and help, so you have to keep digging ;p

The best places to search for are the forums of course, the tutorials in the wiki, NWDA tutorials and TGBlog. The scale of the program is vast, so the best way to learn is to just try and do something, and when you inevitably run into something you can't do, search for help for that specific problem.

[Henry Blewer]

My tutorial may be delayed. We are short on help at work for another week.