I was reading a thread on Johns Mcduff tutorial and there was a comment made of a possible manual or users guide. I took it upon myself to create a thread (hopefully this thread isn't a duplicate of another)
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7733.90
Planetside,
As the quick online access tabs (?) are very useful, I'm quite sure I'm not alone while saying - I would like to see a hard copy manual. Mojoworld v3 has an extensive manual created by Doc, Ruth and the beta testers that covers all major functions in mojo and its plug-in features (Mojotree, Mojomove, Rivers, Mojovox >Rip Vox<), Now since its release there has been upgrades (3.1 & Dmytry's Volumetrics) however the basic functionality remains the same with the upgrades so the manual is still very useful. And the feel of a book to reference off of I think is more appealing to a user than flippin screens (Speaking for myself). So perhaps Planetsides Terragen once (if not already) is somewhat finalized would consider offering a paper manual/user guide complete with screen shots and detailed explainations. This of course would be a major undertakening and I wouldn't expect this to be free by any means. This would be worth the purchase hense benifical for both Planetside and users. Something to chew on, if it hasn't been addressed already.
Regards
Danny Gordon
I thought I read on these forums that a manual was being made? Im not sure if I'm connecting the dots right, but there was something about a user made manual that never got done. And something about planetside making one once they could compile all the information. I don't know, internet threads are funny things. But Im looking forward to getting a copy!
I would say that it should be a pdf, and we can just print it are selves.
OK this was a duplicate, disregard. Nice that some docs (Book form or PDF) will be available to print
Danny
I have a copy of the MojoWorld 3 manual and it's dated 2004, yow. Long time ago.
Here's some work (http://plugsandpixels.com/mojoworld.html) I did with the app.
Hi,
Quote from: plugsnpixels on August 10, 2011, 02:46:04 AM
I have a copy of the MojoWorld 3 manual and it's dated 2004, yow. Long time ago.
Random fact and OT, but I worked for Pandromeda to get the Mac version of Mojoworld up and running for the first release. That would have been 2001 I guess. I was working on TG Mac at the time although I wasn't exactly making a living from it. There was the option of continuing to work for Pandromeda but I always thought TG had more potential and I wanted to stick with it.
Regards,
Jo
Is Mojoworld still alive? The latest version 3 is from 2004 and the website still is copyrighted until 2004, indicating/hinting that it hasn't been updated for 7 years. Makes me wonder.
Every once in a while I see 1 or 2 images show up at DA for example, so a very small group of people seem to use it sometimes.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on August 10, 2011, 09:32:43 AM
Is Mojoworld still alive? The latest version 3 is from 2004 and the website still is copyrighted until 2004, indicating/hinting that it hasn't been updated for 7 years.
...
Tangled-Universe please don't say it loud :)
(look at the bottom of this page)
Latest version was 3.1 in 2005. Its old but I use it often. Fun to tinker with, especially the iso surfaces with Dmytry Lavrov's volumetric plug-in. There probably would be more users if they dropped the price a bit, its still 479 bucks !
Doc Mojo AKA Ken Musgrave showed up at the Renderosity Mojoworld forums some time ago and as far as i am aware he would not even say a darn thing as to say on weather he was still working on Mojoworld. How can you not loose respect for a software developer who stays entirely silent over his user base? At least Daz Bryce 7 is still growing, slowly but it is not a case of dead silence even at Daz which i am not fond of them.
There are legal issues that prevent Doc or anyone affiliated w/ Pandromeda from commenting on the lack of development he made that clear on his stop @ Rendo. Failer to turn a profit (I hear) was the main reason of these "Legal Issues" That being said the SDK for plug-ins is still open for anyone who wants to create 3rd party plugs. Besides that I am pretty certain Pandromeda is done.
I think 6 years without an update says it all. It's a shame though as Musgrave contributed a lot to the industry as a whole and our little niche of it in particular. I would have liked to see where things would go with Mojo, especially as improvements in multi-core CPUs, much larger amounts of memory, GPGPU, etc. have become readily available to the average person.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on August 10, 2011, 05:30:04 PM
I think 6 years without an update says it all. It's a shame though as Musgrave contributed a lot to the industry as a whole and our little niche of it in particular. I would have liked to see where things would go with Mojo, especially as improvements in multi-core CPUs, much larger amounts of memory, GPGPU, etc. have become readily available to the average person.
- Oshyan
Definitely. Without him perhaps TG2 wouldn't be around...?
"Methods for Realistic Landscape Imaging" 1993.
http://www.kenmusgrave.com/dissertation.pdf
I don't know Martin, have to ask Matt that, but I would not be at all surprised!
- Oshyan
Doc's website:
http://www.kenmusgrave.com/
Which has not been updated in over ten years i think. :P
It's sad to see a team and a product with so much potential just disappear.
More or less the same thing happened with Animatek World Builder, Vista Pro, and more. I remember World Builder in particular having some interesting ideas as far as that generation of software.
- Oshyan
Unfortunately it's the nature of the business! I see this a lot with PS plug-ins, though it happens with all kinds of apps. I don't envy developers! Takes a special breed.
Vista (on the Amiga, of course; the PC was pretty awful for graphics in the early 90s). Vista was a big inspiration for me, as well as other landscape generation experiments I saw in the early 90s. I don't know how much they were influenced by Musgrave and Mandelbrot, but I imagine they must have been, directly or indirectly. Later I saw Mandelbrot's 1982 book:
http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869
I'd already got the bug before I found this book, but if I remember rightly it contained some great fractal mountain renders, probably by Ken Musgrave, which further inspired me. There was a picture that had steep fractal mountains surrounding a valley filled with white haze. I don't remember much more than that, but I am sure I must have learned a few things from Mandelbrot's book. But I don't think I actually read any of Ken's research until much later, except maybe what was in that book. If there were any rendering aspects to learn, I think they may have gone over my head or I was too lazy to try them, but I was developing methodologies for rendering terrains and atmospheres based on ideas I'd seen in Vista and other bits and pieces I picked up along the way. But I am sure Ken Musgrave's work made a big difference to what was happening all around. And since then I've read some of his work.
In these early days, I actually have just as strong a memory of thinking about global illumination - I didn't know what to call it back then, but I thought of it as "environment lighting" - but I didn't know about academic graphics research, and I didn't see it being done in 3D programs at the time. I understood why, because it would be computationally very expensive, but I dreamed that one day I could write my own renderer that could do this stuff. And now I have :) But of course there's no end to the ways it could be improved.
At some point I got fascinated with the idea of rendering skies that were way beyond what Vista was capable of. Fractals were central to the rendering of clouds, so Mandelbrot and Musgrave were important as they were with terrains, but it was the lighting of atmospheres that really fascinated me, and that's where I thought the biggest leaps forward could be made. It almost looked like other programs didn't care about lighting and I couldn't understand why, but it was exciting to have ideas that I knew could make them better.
I'd always been interested in rendering planets in other 3D programs and it was only a matter of time before I tried to do the same with Terragen. About 2001 was when I decided to start. At that point of course I'd seen Ken's work on planets, and, you know, knowing that something is possible is half the battle - once you know it's possible, you just dive in and figure out how to do it. But the ideas for these things build over years, and I often don't remember where they come from. It's hard to really quantify how much influence someone's had, or even remember how much you've read, when looking back.
I suppose that if Mandelbrot hadn't defined fractals and Musgrave hadn't pioneered the rendering of them, maybe I would have been writing a general purpose renderer, fueled by those earlier dreams of "environment lighting". Maybe there isn't a huge difference, but general rendering is a hard space to be influential in because you're competing with many, many other similar products.
Matt
The ubiquity of the web these days is such a contrast to the insular environment that I did my experiments in all those years ago. What we have today is so much information available to us whenever we ask for it, it's hard to imagine how I figured anything out back then...
Matt
I used Vista, Vista Pro 3, Scenery Generator, and World Construction Set. WCS could take a week on one 640 x 400 render. They were fun to play with.
Quote from: Matt on August 10, 2011, 08:26:23 PM
...but it was the lighting of atmospheres that really fascinated me, and that's where I thought the biggest leaps forward could be made. It almost looked like other programs didn't care about lighting and I couldn't understand why, but it was exciting to have ideas that I knew could make them better.
...
Matt
If i remember correctly , for a time in the early 2000 i thought no program could be better then "Animatek World Builder" or "World Construction Set" .
But the lighting of Terragen was really special those times too to me!
The others had so much more features but looked kind of advanced game renderer's or more painterly from that aspect.
Not that they were bad for their times but...
When i saw this page :
http://web.archive.org/web/20051212063346/http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tgd/tgd.shtml
Images like the "Cloud Study at Washington Pass" or Luc and others work made me look at that page every day afterwards :)
hi
for "nostalgic" people (and others ;) ) I have put back some of my Terragen pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66188926@N03/sets/
luc
Quote from: Kadri on August 10, 2011, 09:31:06 PM
../..
Images like the "Cloud Study at Washington Pass" or Luc and others work made me look at that page every day afterwards :)
Hey it's Luc. It's been a while ;D
Quote from: Matt on August 10, 2011, 08:26:23 PM
At some point I got fascinated with the idea of rendering skies that were way beyond what Vista was capable of. Fractals were central to the rendering of clouds, so Mandelbrot and Musgrave were important as they were with terrains, but it was the lighting of atmospheres that really fascinated me, and that's where I thought the biggest leaps forward could be made. It almost looked like other programs didn't care about lighting and I couldn't understand why, but it was exciting to have ideas that I knew could make them better.
Nice read Matt on how you got into developing TG2.
TG2 still has a leap when it comes to lighting in clouds and atmospheres, but also in fractals perhaps.
I don't know any out of the box packages which does these better, especially the biggest competitor is still inferior imo.
Search volumetric clouds on the web and you'll find very few really good looking examples except for some big buck productions or proprietary methods from studios (search "Red Baron" clouds for instance).
Quote from: Luc Bianco on August 11, 2011, 02:37:21 AM
hi
for "nostalgic" people (and others ;) ) I have put back some of my Terragen pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66188926@N03/sets/
luc
I consider myself "nostalgic", but that's actually for past tense of course and that remains to be seen, hopefully ;)
Cheers
Martin
Quote from: Luc Bianco on August 11, 2011, 02:37:21 AM
hi
for "nostalgic" people (and others ;) ) I have put back some of my Terragen pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66188926@N03/sets/
luc
It's great to see some of your images again Luc. I never understood when you "retired" from Terragen why you removed your images from the web. Why not leave them online for everyone to enjoy your work\passion?
Also when are you going to come out of Terragen retirement and start creating some amazing images again?
Hi
Because I did not want to keep one "dead" site online and lot of my pictures were still available on some blogs, forums... (just test a images search with my name on google)
But I agree it is better to have them on one place. Now it is !
luc
Quote from: reck on August 11, 2011, 04:24:59 AM
It's great to see some of your images again Luc. I never understood when you "retired" from Terragen why you removed your images from the web. Why not leave them online for everyone to enjoy your work\passion?
Also when are you going to come out of Terragen retirement and start creating some amazing images again?
Has this "Terragen2 Paper Manual" thread been hijacked or what?
John
Quote from: Luc Bianco on August 11, 2011, 02:37:21 AM
hi
for "nostalgic" people (and others ;) ) I have put back some of my Terragen pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66188926@N03/sets/
luc
Luc , Reck did ask what i thought ! Good to have your images in one place again , thanks.
I hope we will see new ones too ;)
Eeee...yeah a manual in Book form or PDF would be good ::)....really !
Quote from: Kadri on August 10, 2011, 09:31:06 PM
...
When i saw this page :
http://web.archive.org/web/20051212063346/http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tgd/tgd.shtml
Images like the "Cloud Study at Washington Pass" or Luc and others work made me look at that page every day afterwards :)
This http://web.archive.org/web/20070125034531/http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/v/tg2gallery/mars_surface_07_post_crop.jpg.html
is still a totally awesome render. It's "just" a barren Mars landscape, but frankly, even with what I know of TG2 today, I'm not sure if I would be able to replicate this at the same level of complexity as the original is. To me, this is simply beautiful!
Regards,
Frank
Yeah, I still love that image too Frank. Still in our web gallery btw: http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/f/tg2/mars_surface_07_post_crop.jpg.html
;D
- Oshyan
A Matt's one, great :o
Quote from: schmeerlap on August 11, 2011, 06:23:14 AM
Has this "Terragen2 Paper Manual" thread been hijacked or what?
Looks like it has, John. Woops, just got shoved into the gutter by some big heavyweight Terrangeners. "S-s-s-s-sorry I got in your way, guys".
John
Quote from: schmeerlap on August 12, 2011, 06:54:02 AM
Quote from: schmeerlap on August 11, 2011, 06:23:14 AM
Has this "Terragen2 Paper Manual" thread been hijacked or what?
Looks like it has, John. Woops, just got shoved into the gutter by some big heavyweight Terrangeners. "S-s-s-s-sorry I got in your way, guys".
John
Yep its gotten High jacked alright, but considering the company and the insight gained, it's fine by me
Danny