THis recent update is awesome. However, I would like a little explanations of what a geometry based animation is? I saw the example video but still am a little confused. Also, how do I import it? Thx
Also - has anyone been following the MDD format raised by (I believe) Lightwave, which uses obj files and a companion file (mdd) to describe motion, morphs etc...
Terragen 2 supports sequences (of images and objects, primarily) in an increasing number of fields. The object sequence support simply added this capability to the object readers. If you look at the Sequence/Output tab of the Renderer you can see what a typical sequence specification looks like for frame numbering: imagename.%04d.bmp. The %04d specifies sequential numbering with 4 digits, so you end up with files like imagename.0001.bmp, imagename.0002.bmp, etc.
You use the same syntax to specify object sequences. Simply load the 1st object in an object sequence into the appropriate object loader (e.g. OBJ), then change the name of the file specified in the node to an appropriate syntax reflecting the numbering scheme of your object sequence. For example if your object sequence has 3 digits, e.g. object.001.obj, object.002.obj, etc., then you would put object.%03d.obj in the object path specification. This tells Terragen that the object it's loading is actually a sequence of objects with 3 digits. It will then load 1 per frame from 000 to 999.
Of course you need to be licensed for animation functionality for this to work.
- Oshyan
note there is still a bug when changing the name of the object
myObject.0001.obj
try to change the name to
myObject.%4d.obj
terragen will popup a warning box every time you change a single character of the 0001...
but otherwise it works just fine
as for the MDD format - there are a few formats that use this technique
basically the first file is the base mesh - imagine a character in the classic T-Pose
the other file is a point cloud that stores the point position of the base mesh for each frame of the animation
it can be very fast in some cases...though it has it's own quirks :)
that geometry in the video was made in Houdini and simply exported as an obj sequence - then as Oshyan said, just imported as you would any other obj, change the numbering to reflect the sequence and that's it.