Planetside Software Forums

General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: Avisynth on May 16, 2012, 11:19:33 AM

Title: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: Avisynth on May 16, 2012, 11:19:33 AM
OK , instead of creating Planet with Houdini and waste a lot of time tweaking I decide to play with Terragen ,

here is the Problem i have so far , it seems that there is no Good way to import Terragen file into Houdini , i did try to use Micro exporter to export to .Obj , but the Problem is simple scene file size become 1GB  :o

I mean WTF , Houdini wouldn't run that file and even if it did it will be a Pain in the ass to work with it inside Houdini ,

Any Solutions ?

Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: cyphyr on May 16, 2012, 11:58:38 AM
What elements of your scene will be created natively in Houdini? I ask because if your not interested in going down the comping route it may be more fruitful to export your Houdini models in to Terragen. Make sure you bake out any of Houdini's procedural textures to uv'd bitmaps and you should be able to render in Terragen. Of course this does depend on the scene your creating.
Good luck
Richard
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: Avisynth on May 16, 2012, 12:09:15 PM
that's not work , Because almost 80% of the work will be done inside Houdini such as Modeling / Animation / Visual effects / , so export all that to another app really not Good choice at all since many of Visual effects scene will depend on Mantra Render Engine

Th reason i want use Terragen is because it could save me a lot of time , creating Planet with Houdini will take a lot of time and even that I'm not sure it will look just like Terragen Planet

P.S

i saw your demo 2 days ago Richard , what amazing work mate , really great work you have done , i wonder if the Camera Animation done inside Terragen or you Import that from some other app ?
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: cyphyr on May 16, 2012, 12:58:59 PM
Thanks :)
Terragen can animate natively within itself and it has the ability too import .chan files which contain position, rotation, FoV and frame data. Pretty sure Houdini can export this.
At the moment I don't think Terragen can export camera data although if you feel like a challenge you could bake the camera in Terragen and extract the motion data from the terragen scene file (.tgd). Terragens file format is basically an xml file so is easily readable in any text editor. You could then construct your own .chan file to import into Houdini.
cheers
Richard
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: Kadri on May 16, 2012, 02:05:14 PM

From your post it looks like you should render in TG2 and use the rendered images comped together in Houdini or some hybrid similar approach like all in post etc.
If you carefully plan your scene you could export some useful parts as objects.
I assume you know that you can get high or low quality objects by adjusting your render settings accordingly...

It is difficult to comment without knowing how the scene exactly will be unfortunately .
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=13692.0  an example. There are other posts too here probably.
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: penboack on May 16, 2012, 07:10:11 PM
Try this video on Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/831399 (https://vimeo.com/831399)
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: Avisynth on May 17, 2012, 04:40:42 AM
Quote from: penboack on May 16, 2012, 07:10:11 PM
Try this video on Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/831399 (https://vimeo.com/831399)

I already try that , i can't get the sky working in Houdini
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: TheBadger on May 17, 2012, 04:42:02 AM
Just following this thread
Title: Re: Terragen and Houdini
Post by: goldfarb on May 17, 2012, 01:30:24 PM
I would really recommend using comp to get past all these issues...
establish your scene in Terragen
export a VERY low res terrain (or a few med/high res for detail placement) to Houdini for use as a layout proxy
model/rig/animate etc in Houdini using the terrains
animate the camera in Houdini

render all the Houdini stuff with mantra as elements
export the camera to Terragen
render the background and sky etc in Terragen all as elements

back in Houdini use COPs to comp it all together