Planetside Software Forums

General => User-contributed Tutorials => Topic started by: digitalguru on July 28, 2013, 12:06:01 PM

Title: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on July 28, 2013, 12:06:01 PM
Hi all,

I've just posted a beginners tutorial on using Render Elements in Terragen 3 (and compositing them).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV5CbND5ERc

Hope you find it useful, comments and feedback very welcome!
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: cyphyr on July 28, 2013, 01:05:27 PM
Excellent :) You've lived up to your name. Thankyou :)
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on July 28, 2013, 01:08:50 PM
thanks! more to come...
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Oshyan on July 28, 2013, 04:25:50 PM
Very nicely done. The demo at the end of changing the terrain lighting from within Nuke was especially cool.


Edit: Posting this to our social media feeds. :)

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Matt on July 28, 2013, 04:28:37 PM
This is great!

Matt
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on July 28, 2013, 04:42:47 PM
thanks guys!
this version is great - discovering some cool things to do with it...
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Antoine on July 29, 2013, 01:35:00 AM
Thank you !
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Dune on July 29, 2013, 02:55:05 AM
Thanks very much! This is really helpful and made very clear!
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Kadri on July 29, 2013, 08:31:46 AM

Hi guys.
I like the new features in TG 3 very much.
Congrats and thanks for your hard work guys.
As we always want more i have a question about TG 3 that came to my mind after i saw this last very nice tutorial.
Especially the last part.
We know that Terragen's render times can be long .
Is there any way that you can incorporate that great re lighting procedure in any way to TG3 itself?
I am not asking to make a new Nuke or so in TG 3 i am just curious if it is reasonable or not o have a basic relighting-pass management kinda way in TG 3 itself.
This would be one of the new killer features in TG 3 if it is possible of course.
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on July 29, 2013, 08:46:44 AM
One thing I should mention is that the relighting technique in Nuke only changes the diffuse lighting.

It can't change shadows or global illumination.

So, you can change the diffuse lighting in Nuke. But by replacing the diffuse element with the relighting setup, you wil lose any shadowing.

And global illumination is based on bounced light from the original Terragen light source.

So this technique is better to make tweaks to the lighting rather than radical changes.

Another use might be to animate subtle patches of light over a terrain to simulate the effect of cloud cover occluding sunlight overhead. That way you could take a still image rendered in Terrain and create an animation that has some "life" in it.
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Bjur on July 29, 2013, 10:17:13 AM
Those plain, simple but informative video tutorials like yours and Martin's for example, are helpful for a lot of users, not just for TG beginners.

Thx for your tutorial digitalguru.

Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Kadri on July 29, 2013, 12:23:37 PM
Thanks for the tutorial and explanation .
Do you know other software in that we can make similar changes?
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on July 29, 2013, 12:35:32 PM
I think After Effects and Fusion have a relight workflow, though it might involve plugins.

Don't know those prgrams but I'd imagine the process is much the same.
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Kadri on July 29, 2013, 12:38:22 PM

Thanks :)
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: reck on July 29, 2013, 02:25:44 PM
Quote from: Kadri on July 29, 2013, 12:23:37 PM
Do you know other software in that we can make similar changes?

Maybe Blenders compositor?
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: inkydigit on July 30, 2013, 05:50:09 PM
Awesome! Thanks digitalguru!
:)
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: TheBadger on August 14, 2013, 12:34:33 AM
Haven't gone through these new tuts yet. But THANK YOU! Im looking forward to getting into all of this!
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: dorianvan on August 22, 2013, 08:15:17 AM
Thank you for doing this tutorial; good info. And Nuke is some cool editing software; a little expensive, but I can see why.  Just wondering if checking all the elements doubled your rendering time? Are there certain elements that add more time than others?
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on August 22, 2013, 10:56:07 AM
Rendering with elements may add a little extra time, but not enough for me to figure out the difference - certainly not double the render time though :-)

Mind you, it was a simple scene for the tutorial - rendering a bigger scene now, so may see something then...

Of course there is the extra render of rendering the plane in this example - since you can split the scene into layers it would be great if you could output the imported 3d object in the the same render pass to a separate set of render elements, which would speed things up enormously (Matt - any chance of this in the future? :-)

In any event for an imported object that moves indepently of the scene, I'd want to render it out in a 3d prog, as Terragen doesn't do motion blur for animated objects yet.

Nuke is expensive, but other comp programs could handle the basic comp just as well, Blender or After Effects, though the relight tool is a little specialised.

Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: dorianvan on August 22, 2013, 12:16:08 PM
QuoteOf course there is the extra render of rendering the plane in this example
What do you mean the extra render?
Also, is there any chance you could post a higher resolution screen grab in Nuke of all the element images? It's helpful to see what each one is capturing. Thanks.
Edit:  On exporting exr's through the sequencer, do I need to change the gamma correction to 1.0 in the effects tab, or does the exr exclude that setting?
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on August 22, 2013, 12:39:44 PM
the "extra" render was refering to the Biplane object I used in the tutorial - "extra" was probably misleading :-)

I'll post a screengrab of the comp when I can tomorrow

Edit: You don't have to change any settings when outputting to exr - by default it's linear. The gamma correction does not apply.
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: digitalguru on August 23, 2013, 08:10:08 AM
hi dorianvan - here's a higher resolution screengrab of the comp in the tutorial
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: rcallicotte on October 07, 2013, 07:04:03 PM
Thank you so much!  Now to save up to get Nuke!!   ;D
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: archonforest on October 08, 2013, 07:54:10 PM
Thx a LOT!!
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: PeterParker on March 19, 2014, 12:55:59 PM
The Videos are deleted :(
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: matrix2003 on March 19, 2014, 03:25:55 PM
Yeah, I just came back to re-visit this, and POOF!
Title: Re: Terragen 3 - Render Elements tutorial
Post by: Oshyan on March 19, 2014, 05:05:19 PM
Not sure why they were taken down but I think some or all of them are back up elsewhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihY_kp2rzxg&feature=youtu.be

- Oshyan