As I announced in my Forest thread, I'm trying to do a little animation of the scene.
Here is a first preview in lousy quality and with horrible GI flickering.
Looks cool! 8)
I would do the fly through way slower so we can enjoy the beauty of your forest and at the end pull up the cam above the trees and cut. :)
Great start and interesting and beautiful environment for an animation.
Just an idea (I don't know where your plans are leading to):
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?
Means: no camera benching. Just an up and down and slighly rotate left and right as if you're holding the cam and walk. similar to the chase in my Alien sequence but just slowly, calm and nice :)
Quote from: DocCharly65 on September 12, 2016, 05:03:06 AM
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?
Hey that is also a good idea!
Quote from: DocCharly65 on September 12, 2016, 05:03:06 AM
Great start and interesting and beautiful environment for an animation.
Just an idea (I don't know where your plans are leading to):
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?
Means: no camera benching. Just an up and down and slighly rotate left and right as if you're holding the cam and walk. similar to the chase in my Alien sequence but just slowly, calm and nice :)
Indeed cool idea!! I had something like that in my mind and it sounds really interesting. But this is going to be a challenge, since animating a camera like that in TG isn't quite easy.
At the moment I'm testing the animation of the leaves, and it looks quite promising. I did that before, so this shouldn't be too difficult.
The "walking cam" isn't that difficult, I think.
But you'll need several tests to find out the best timing and curve for the up-down movement and the left-right rotation. Perhaps you get good results if you can test the movement filming a real walk. If you use that as a base and find a way to reproduce that movement smoother (like steadycam movement) you have it. My alien chase is a quite rudimentary run and was easy to make (except turning around corners ;) )
After 2020 I will perhaps come back to learn about animating plants movement. :)
Good idea, Hannes. I like your animations, so this will be a stunner too. I agree about the movement, a slow subtle movement would suit this forest more I think. Even if you just kind of look around you and have some tree/leaf movement it would be cool.
Nice.
Doc's suggestion is good.
Indeed. Atm I'm rendering a test animation with a "walking" camera and animated leaves. Will take some time...
The walking cam, or indeed hand-held cam looks best in reality. After many attempts over the years, the best solution I've found to this is to take a camera, film the view in front of you as you walk down a path/road somewhere with minimal moving objects, track that and import to TG... possibly via Maya. Time consuming, but could be worth it. Plus if you've never tracked your own footage, you can learn a new skill. ;)
The environment shows a lot of promise so this effect seems worth it to me.
Cool Hannes! I liked the images too.
I can't tell you how much I would like to see that T rex in a tweed jacket say, in a very Harvard accent, something clever to the human figure, ending with an invite to dinner. But this fly through is rather enjoyable also.
Here is another test. Like before lousy quality, noisy and horribly flickering. But at least you can get an impression.
I handanimated some sort of walking camera and used the same lighting/cloud settings like in my last Forest-image.
Using real footage to get this handheld camera look would be great, but it would be quite difficult to make the camera following my path. So I gave it a try to animate it in TG.
Wow feel like a 3rd person shooter game! :)
Imho the steps a a bit too long.
Looks good Hannes.
I think if you want more of a walking type look then you have, maybe a little more or faster left right look might help.
There are many ways you know you can do this.
Terragen works in meters already. Put one or more stones-landmarks somewhere in the scene.
Repeat the same thing in real life just crudely. Walk and shoot.
Import it on a plane or similar as a front projection and keyframe the Terragen camera to that real landmark.
There was a much easier way with Lightwave. Can't find it now.
But the principle is easy and should be the same in Max (you use that i think Hannes?).
Make a basic animation in Max. Then go to the beginning.
With auto keyframe active as you play the scene make the up and down, left, right moves (or make them separately).
Then import this animation as a chan or fbx file to the camera.
Thanks for your comments!!
Yes, there are many ways to do this. I guess, the most realistic way would be to create a well measured path in real life that has the exact same dimensions like my forest path. Then walk that path with a camera and track it, so that it can be imported into TG. The result would be amazingly realistic I guess. It's quite tedious, but maybe one day I'll do exactly this.
Another way I used before is to use an animated (walking) character in another app, Max in my case (even the mannequin figure in Max would be enough - it's just for the movement) and to bind a camera to his head. Like this you get a quite natural camera movement as well, which can be imported into TG.
I'll do some tests to see, what's possible...
Nice to see, that you're on the way :)
Curious if there is an app for directly exporting camera motion from smartphones?
Looks like everything is perfect- if the camera is the perspective of a T rex.
Oh I so hope I am going to see someone get eaten
This has the makings of a real winner Hannes. "bind a camera to his head" brilliant idea!
Thanks Bobby. I did some tests, but I decided to first render out an animation (in better quality) with the animated camera I created in TG.
The results of my head bound camera I did some time ago looked good, but not too much better than this. A tracked real camera motion would be something else...
Here's a new one. A little bit better quality. At least no GI flicker.
The original was quite noisy, which was reduced by the compression. Why not?
I had to stop the rendering, because from frame 250 on the camera ran into a bush ;D.
Some postwork: I used AE's auto color function.
Big wow! Pretty cool!
Way better...can't wait till I get my new box so I can actually do some Terragening...right now it's click, spinning wheel, make a coffee see if anything has happen'd....sigh...at least I can still get online.
It looks quite nice. A very tall person enjoys a swift walk through the stormy woods. Er, the windy forest. Well, whatever. :D
- Oshyan
Big improvements! Great Hannes.
I'd call it a milestone :)
That's bloody awesome. I now realize I didn't see your first animation, but I really like this. Especially the windy trees. I think you don't even need the walk, but just a look around and the wind, if you ever do this again.
You used the mesh displacer, I guess? Can you expand on settings?
Thanks guys!!
Quote from: Dune on September 20, 2016, 03:03:07 AM
You used the mesh displacer, I guess? Can you expand on settings?
Yes, I did. I duplicated the tree population and set the opacity of one pop's bark shader and the other pop's leaves shader to zero. I displaced only the one with visible leaves. Like that the tree's trunks didn't wobble.
I used a PF to displace the tree and animated it by a transform shader over 300 frames (linear animation in the animation view panel). I used more or less the settings I made for this:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20353.msg201597.html#msg201597
Thanks Hannes. I remember that, must have your file somewhere too. I should do some animating, but I am so impatient :P
Quote from: Hannes on September 20, 2016, 04:20:45 AM
Thanks guys!!
Quote from: Dune on September 20, 2016, 03:03:07 AM
You used the mesh displacer, I guess? Can you expand on settings?
Yes, I did. I duplicated the tree population and set the opacity of one pop's bark shader and the other pop's leaves shader to zero. I displaced only the one with visible leaves. Like that the tree's trunks didn't wobble.
I used a PF to displace the tree and animated it by a transform shader over 300 frames (linear animation in the animation view panel). I used more or less the settings I made for this:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20353.msg201597.html#msg201597
Briiiiliant Hannes...when I get my new box I gonna try this!
Quote from: Dune on September 20, 2016, 07:33:31 AM
Thanks Hannes. I remember that, must have your file somewhere too. I should do some animating, but I am so impatient :P
I tried that too a year ago but I was too impatient too. It always took so long time to wait how changes in the settings work.
Besides, I think with the windy trees in fact you don't need the walking camera movement.
Thanks guys. Yes patience is what you need, if you're animating in TG. Whenever I want to check some changes I made, I disable all unnecessary things temporarily to do some test animtions. Sometimes only 20 frames.
I think I'll keep that walk. I like it.
Quote from: Hannes on September 21, 2016, 03:42:48 AM
Thanks guys. Yes patience is what you need, if you're animating in TG. Whenever I want to check some changes I made, I disable all unnecessary things temporarily to do some test animtions. Sometimes only 20 frames.
I think I'll keep that walk. I like it.
I as well like the walk and with a bit of tweaking could look very realistic...Keep The Faith Hannes!
Obviously I should check this section of the forums more often...this looks really really nice! I really love those moving rays of light, awesome :)