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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
 

 

Adding Objects to the Scene

This section illustrates how to add LightWave objects to your scene, in this case a group of trees, so that they interact with the Terragen terrain.

Load the object into Layout and move it into position, use a shaded view to check that it's resting on the terrain.

Render a test image.

This tree looks a bit lonely so add a few more, rotating and scaling each one to make them look different, or preferably use a few different models.

Note how the trees in the mid ground are standing out a bit too much, we need to try and match the atmosphere that Terragen creates so that they look like they're part of the landscape. Currently the only way of doing this is to use Lightwave's fog.

Open the 'Effects' panel and go to the 'Volumetrics' tab, set the 'Fog Type' to NonLinear1, 'Min Distance' to 0m, 'Max Distance' to 180m, 'Min Amount' to 0%, 'Max Amount' to 100%. These should be reasonable starting values for a terrain with a 1m point spacing.

Set the fog colour.

TIP: Make a note of the 'Shadow Colour' in Terragen (in the Background Light tab), this can often make a good starting colour for LightWave's fog.

Open the 'Objects Properties' panel and set each terrain object to 'Unaffected by Fog'.

NOTE : Some experimentation is called for here as all these fog values will vary from scene to scene. The point spacing of the terrain (1m in this example) and lighting conditions you establish in Terragen will also effect the values you use.

Render a test image.

This looks better but the trees still don't look like they are really sitting on the ground, they need shadows...

 

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