Animation module

[freelancah]

So..Im wondering if I should upgrade to animation module and I got a few questions for those who have it.

-What do you think of it? Is it easy to use?
-What is it lacking at the moment & what needs to be improved?
-Do you use an outside app to control the camera movement or can you do everything inside tg?

My main concern atm is controlling the camera inside terragen. I dont want to rely on outside app to control the camera.

Any thoughts?

[Tangled-Universe]

So..Im wondering if I should upgrade to animation module and I got a few questions for those who have it.

-What do you think of it? Is it easy to use?
-What is it lacking at the moment & what needs to be improved?
-Do you use an outside app to control the camera movement or can you do everything inside tg?

My main concern atm is controlling the camera inside terragen. I dont want to rely on outside app to control the camera.

Any thoughts?

If camera control is your main concern then at this very moment TG2 will not satisfy you.
As you may have read here already PS is working on an animation module upgrade.
I'd await this upgrade and then decide.

[cyphyr]

I find Terragens animation capabilities relatively easy to use (as yet theres not much to it) and remember some time later this year Planetside will be adding a very much more bespoke "animation module" to Terragen. What this is exactly only Planetside know (and maybe a few beta/alpha testers, I really don't know).
If I'm doing a simple animation of maybe three or four keyframes then I'll do it entirely in Terragen but if its any more complex or requires a great deal of precision (very close to the ground or flying through trees for example) then I use a third party app (Lightwave in my case) to set up the animation.
Also remember the animation module is a free upgrade to registered owners of "Terragen Deep with Animation", you might want to check with PS if that is intended as a long term policy.
Hope this helps

Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

Richard is right.
Also, you might even want to register it already, because in the meantime you can practice animating parameters in a static scene.
I'm working on animating water lately and that's quite hard by itself, so I don't bother about cameras at all at this point. Just as example.

[freelancah]

Yeah. Good point. I might upgrade now so I can play with the functions and get to know em better.

Cyphyr: I think I remember Oshyan? saying sometime ago that the module will be free for those who purchased deep with animation, or upgraded to animation afterwards. But I do wonder if it will be more expensive than the 100$ they are asking now, when its released?

Also, any guesses about the release date?

[Seth]

animation module, even if it is not perfect, is a very good tool.
you can animate pretty much everything. as Richard stated, for precise cam moves, it can get difficult but... well with some time, you can get some good animation from it already.

Plus, you can use the animation module for different testing : find a good pov, a good sun orientation, etc...

[Tangled-Universe]

Plus, you can use the animation module for different testing : find a good pov, a good sun orientation, etc...

I find it very useful for animating cloud-parameters and then choose the best settings which suit my ideas/design best.

[cyphyr]

Plus, you can use the animation module for different testing : find a good pov, a good sun orientation, etc...

I find it very useful for animating cloud-parameters and then choose the best settings which suit my ideas/design best.

I wondered if anyone else did that
Keyframe some settings and leave it rendering over night, then in the morning I'll have 200 test images, some of which can be worth refining:)
Richard

[Seth]

great minds think alike, guys

[Eikers]

Plenty of good advice! Thank you very much! 

[rcallicotte]

I'm still waiting for the upgraded animation module.  Any word on it out there?

[PabloMack]

-What do you think of it? Is it easy to use?
-What is it lacking at the moment & what needs to be improved?
-Do you use an outside app to control the camera movement or can you do everything inside tg?

The only animation I have done so far in TG is to move the camera.  This is pretty easy but I have run into a couple of gotchas.  You have to make sure you select the timeline before its key commands will be effective.  I keep finding myself trying to change the current frame and my keystrokes are going off into never-never land only to discover that I have to re-select the timeline's slide bar.  If I move the render camera very far and fast on the timeline with the right or left arrow keys, sometimes TG2 locks up and it seems that the program is jammed.  I then have to exit the program and re-run it to get it back to being responsive.  If I make a change on the timeline, I have to save it so that I don't lose my work in case TG2 freezes again.  Use the PageUp and PageDown keys to move 10 frames at a time before using the right and left arrow keys to move one frame at a time when you are getting close to where you want to be on the timeline.  This will queue up fewer key strokes and the program is less likely to jam.  

Also, there are no markers on the timeline slider to show where you have placed keyframes.  Oshyan says this is going to change.  What is coming is a new spline editor that should make it much easier to do camera movement.  Right now I use the perspective camera to see where the keyframes are.  Move off the camera path (drawn as an orange spline in the pre-render window), say upwards, and then look down on it.  Your keyframes are shown as dots along the camera path.  You will see the render camera's yellow mockup sliding along the camera path as though it were an amusement park ride on a mono-rail.  You will know when the current camera is on a keyframe when the camera's coordinates become green.  For unkeyed frames, the camera's coordinates are shown in blue.  

One thing I like to do it to Pause the pre-render.  This makes the program more responsive when trying to move along the camera path.  When you want to see what the view looks like, then enable the pre-render until you are satisfied that you understand what you are seeing.  

I am now doing an animation render of Oshyan's benchmark scene.  It should be done in a few days and I will post it on YouTube.  I have removed the black ball and I changed the camera resolution to 480 X 270 (9/16 widescreen).  Otherwise, the scene is straight off the website.  (Thank's Oshyan for the great test scene).  I am also doing a 1920 X 1080 high resolution still (with quality all the way to 1) of the first frame of the same scene just for comparison.  Detail looks awesome but that quality slider really makes a difference in sharpness and render time.  This was all done inside TG2.  

[cyphyr]

I think the animation module as it stands at the moment is just something you just "get used to". Everyone has their own little tricks to help out. Possible the best "trick" is to not animate in terragen at all but rather import your animation from an external package. I use Lightwave and their are now several scripts floating about that export motion files to terragen. If I have to animate within Terragen (that would be when I cant be bothered to render out a lwo base mesh to animate over ! lol) another "trick" is to open a second window, set it to top view (could be another view) and move your camera from there. Just remember to click back in the main preview window before you set the key frame. Also remember that once a keyframe is set your not stuck with it, you can still edit everything about that key frame, the only thing you cant do (as yet) is move the key frame to a new frame on the time line.
All or most of this will become redundant once the new module is released but its still good to know
Richard

[PabloMack]

...the only thing you cant do (as yet) is move the key frame to a new frame on the time line.

Oh yes.  That's frustrating.   You have to remember to copy the old key frame's coordinates before deleting it (or create the new one first and transfer the coordinates before deleting).  Otherwise it is like cutting a line holding a spring in place.  Boing!  Now where has that pesky camera path gone?  

I use Lightwave and their are now several scripts floating about that export motion files to terragen.

Whoopie!  I am now using V9.6. Can't wait to give it a try.  I suppose these are L-Scripts that run in LW?  Yes.  Animation is a breeze in LW.  The 3D hardware is fully utilized in its pre-render window.  Comparing pre-render windows in TG and LW are like comparing the speed of water flowing in a glacier and a river respectively.  Shouldn't it be possible for the development team to make the pre-render in TG2 as fast and responsive as that in LW?  I don't necessarily need to see exactly what the scene looks like in the final render.  I just need to know where everything is in relation to everything else.  I suppose that the fractal/procedural nature of the algorithms are too complex and represent too much data to push off to a graphics card with fixed processing pipeline and limited memory.  

[Oshyan]

Correct, a procedural scene is a much different beast from a static geometry scene as far as previewing and GPU-based computation go. We do have plans to multithread the 3D preview in the future, which will certainly speed things up. Right now, as you know, it just uses a single thread, so those of you with 2, 4, 8, or even more threads to use will eventually see a dramatic speedup in the 3D preview.

As for the animation module, we don't have a release date at this point (unsurprisingly). We will of course update everyone as soon as we can provide more information. We've been as open as possible about the features that can be expected.

- Oshyan