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LW²TG Documentation

 

 

 

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LW²TG Tutorials
Basic Setup & Camera Matching
  Adding LightWave Objects to the Scene
  Casting Shadows from LightWave Objects onto the Terrain
  Animating with Motion Blur
  Matching a Terragen Scene in Layout
 

 

Matching a Terragen Scene

It's often best to do your location hunting in Terragen, once you've created a suitable terrain and found a camera position for your animation the following notes will help you to match this scene in LightWave.

Follow the instructions on the Basic Setup & Camera Matching page to import the terrain model from Terragen into LightWave Layout.

Open up the 'Lighting Conditions' dialog in Terragen, jot down the Sun Heading and Sun Altitude settings from your Terragen scene.

Switch back to layout and select the 'terragen_sun' light.Open the numeric requester for the light's rotation, in the heading field enter the value you took for heading in Terragen plus 180 degrees.

TIP: You can do sums directly in the input field, for example, say that the Terragen sun heading is -70 degrees, you can enter '-70+180' and when you hit return Lightwave will perform the addition and update the field.

Next enter the altitude from Terragen into the Pitch field, Bank is irrelevant here, press OK to close the requester. Make a keyframe for the light at frame 0. The light now matches the direction of the sun in Terragen.

Next we'll set up the camera. Note down the 'Camera Position' and 'Camera Orientation' values from the 'Rendering Control' panel in Terragen. Enter these values into both the position and rotation of Lightwaves camera. Terragen uses a Z up coordinate system so you will need to swap the Y and Z positions, ie the Z position in Terragen becomes the Y position in LightWave and the Y position in Terragen becomes the Z position in LightWave. You will also need to reverse the pitch direction, ie a pitch of 5 degrees in Terragen becomes a pitch of -5 degrees in LightWave. Once you have done this create a keyframe for the camera at frame 0.

If you want to match the default field of view in Terragen open the Camera panel in Lightwave and set the Zoom Factor to 1.88 (a good starting point...the script exporter plugin will calculate this more accurately).

 

 

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Terragen is Copyright © 2000 M.P.Fairclough, Planetside Software.
Site & contents © 2001 M.Brown