Hi All,
I'd like to announce the upcoming launch of CGScenery.com
CGScenery will be my personal portfolio website as well as an online resource for Terragen 2 tutorials.
The first series of tutorials will cover the very basics of the software.
From there the tutorials will slowly advance to "intermediate" and "advance" level tutorials which will be categorized and search-able.
Examples of topics are:
- User Interface
- 3D preview navigation
- Building a basic scene
- Node network & Tab based system similarities and differences
- Understanding node network (data) flow
- Importing objects or populations of objects and positiioning
- Rendering
- Common problems / FAQ
- etc. etc. etc.
Many of these topics can be discussed at different levels of expertise, so they will be split into appropriate categories on the website.
The official date of the launch will be announced in a new topic.
I'm confident my learning path will cover many aspects of working and having fun with Terragen 2, but for the time being I'm very interested in knowing what you'd like to see discussed. Just in case I might miss something or may be I'm not aware of some of your wishes.
Please keep your shortlists brief and tight, using bullet-like formatting as above.
Cheers,
Martin
This is going to be an awesome resource, I am sure of that!
Can't wait to see the new page!
Way to go T-U 8)
Really looking forward to seeing this
This is very good news! Topics 4 & 5 from above are exactly what I would have wished for. Hope this happens soon, and a very large TIA!
Gaaf initiatief, Martin. Ben benieuwd. Good luck setting it up!
Ulco
I am sure it will be a nice source for TG2 .
QuoteI'd like to announce the upcoming launch of CGScenery.com
CGScenery will be my personal portfolio website as well as an online resource for Terragen 2 tutorials.
The first series of tutorials will cover the very basics of the software.
From there the tutorials will slowly advance to "intermediate" and "advance" level tutorials which will be categorized and search-able.
You are a beautiful and unique human being Martin! Yes I mean it. I would praise you more for this, but it would sound like I am slobbering ;D
Actually, the best part is that I don't have to become a cannibal now! I was going to buy a plain ticket and fly to Europe to find you so I could steal your brains. I read in a comic book someplace when I was a kid, that if you eat the brains of someone you get all of their knowledge.
Live long and prosper. Or God bless, if you prefer! :-*
P.S. The website ID/logo looks great too
Great initiative, Martin.
The answer to your question what we'd like to see in my case would be: Anything! There are so many aspects I'd like to learn more about.
Looking forward to this :) Congrats.
All the best to your project, it sounds very good!
Just try to keep it all simple as possible. During my reverse engineerings, i´ve faced some so weird "node explosions", my nose started to bleed instantly.. ;D
Nice work Martin. If anyone can accomplish the daunting task of putting it all together it's you.
Very glad to see this coming together. Looking forward to seeing your hard work pay off!
- Oshyan
Thanks for the heads up.
It's great to see you doing this.
I think that this will be a superb resource.
Good luck.
Hi Martin,
That sounds really great, I look forward to seeing it.
Regards,
Jo
This is a great idea. Good luck pulling it all together!
It's a detail conscious guy like yourself who will put together a wonderful encyclopedia for learning computer graphics with Terragen 2 ...looking forward!
Thank you all so far for the positive feedback :)
At the moment I'm writing transcripts and doing a little practicing for the tutorials.
My intention is to launch the website this year.
@ TheBadger:
I'm happy I'm one step ahead of you then :P
Quote from: Bjur on December 04, 2012, 01:48:38 PM
All the best to your project, it sounds very good!
Just try to keep it all simple as possible. During my reverse engineerings, i´ve faced some so weird "node explosions", my nose started to bleed instantly.. ;D
Don't worry for now. Complex node networks can evolve if you especially have a good understanding of the node network (flow).
Especially the first handful of tutorials are very basic and it is my intention to build it up step wise.
Cheers,
Martin
Looking forward to this ;)
Great stuff. You'll do well with this.
Eventually, you should also try to do a tutorial on how to make a big sun wit Terragen 2 like you see in a lot of renders all over the internet but hardly any tutorials. There are a lot of people I know that want to know how to make renders like those ones.
Either way, this site looks like it's going to be fantastic. :-)
I have an idea for something that needs done. A run through of all the tweaks in the powerfractal. Possibly renders of what the effect is. I've put files around that have deliberately basic settings because I've tried to show certain graph effects. The art is then tweaking the fractals to have more interesting forms. I think a full run through of this simple starting point is currently lacking.
good news...great logo...can't wait...well done
Quote from: claytonr on December 06, 2012, 08:25:56 PM
Eventually, you should also try to do a tutorial on how to make a big sun wit Terragen 2 like you see in a lot of renders all over the internet but hardly any tutorials. There are a lot of people I know that want to know how to make renders like those ones.
Either way, this site looks like it's going to be fantastic. :-)
Thanks Clayton. Eventually tutorials for "minor" subjects like these will be added too. I have about a dozen in my head of those.
First I will start with the basics of TG2 so that everybody can start scene building as quickly as possible.
I consider this the most important (missing information).
At a later stage definitely tricks and how to's will be added.
Quote from: efflux on December 06, 2012, 09:37:55 PM
I have an idea for something that needs done. A run through of all the tweaks in the powerfractal. Possibly renders of what the effect is. I've put files around that have deliberately basic settings because I've tried to show certain graph effects. The art is then tweaking the fractals to have more interesting forms. I think a full run through of this simple starting point is currently lacking.
It's in my list of tutorials, and actually at a pretty high position. I do have a little problem though.
I need help from Matt with this, because especially in the tweak tab there are some parameters I can't really explain well.
For instance, but I do *not* want to deviate the discussion towards this, the bouyancy and clumping parameters are not effective in all modulation modes and I can't tell exactly how noise variation works for every specific modulation mode.
I write transcripts for my tutorials so I'm considering asking Matt to go through the transcript for the powerfractal.
It's an essential node I reckon.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on December 07, 2012, 04:12:00 AM
It's in my list of tutorials, and actually at a pretty high position. I do have a little problem though.
I need help from Matt with this, because especially in the tweak tab there are some parameters I can't really explain well.
For instance, but I do *not* want to deviate the discussion towards this, the bouyancy and clumping parameters are not effective in all modulation modes and I can't tell exactly how noise variation works for every specific modulation mode.
I write transcripts for my tutorials so I'm considering asking Matt to go through the transcript for the powerfractal.
It's an essential node I reckon.
Yeah, tell me about it. This should have been priority from square one. I'm not totally familiar either with the way these things work. I think it's a priority though so cool if you can deal with this. I'm doing stuff where nodes are doing specific things and I want to show that without getting artistic with the fractals and obscuring what is going on. I feel people (especially new users) have problems quickly designing cooler shapes. I don't want to provide ready made files too much. I want to concentrate on dealing with technical details that others can add their own slant to.
Very interested
Brilliant. Can't wait. Will put this URL everywhere I can, once you're up and running. ;D
I, for one, am very much looking forward to this! I've been using Terragen since 2001 and I've been consistently frustrated by the lack of documentation (for goodness sake, World Machine has a better user's manual!). Since I use the program professionally, I can hardly imagine the time I've wasted trying to figure out something I should have been able to do in a few minutes. A series of tutorials that begins with a clear explanation of the interface and the program's functions would be a godsend.
When are the doors going to open ;D
Hi Danny,
There's been quite some delay unfortunately, because of both fortunate as well as unfortunate conditions.
TerraLive took quite some of my TG2 focus and a significant part of december/early january I was sick.
Nonetheless it's still going to happen soon :)
Cheers,
Martin
Sounds good Martin, these tutorials mentioned above are they going to be in video or in text form ? I think its now confirmed now, video tutorials are much more effective IMO. This will take up more realestate on your host site of course, however I think it would be more utilized if it were in video. Thats my 2 cents anyway, look forward to it either way
Cheers
Danny
No they will be in video. That has been my plan from the beginning. I think that's in my openings post of this topic(?).
I agree with you video is more effect. See one do is teach one.
Do you know what video player you will use Martin?
Some are really not well suited for Tutorials. But some let you pause, skip chapter points, and just smoothly move back and forth.
Maybe its the host server? But it seems like some players work much better than others. Or will we be able to download? That would be best, but I would understand why you would not want to do that.
Video .. Nice ^^ I didn't see 'video' defined in the initial post. This is good news. This is alot of work to set up, if you are in need of some assistance gettting set up I would be happy to help, shoot me a note if that is the case
Danny
Thanks for the encouragement guys.
I already kind of cursed at myself for not having this set up and running by now, so this will give an extra 'kick' :)
About the video player.
I was thinking of starting lazy and buying a subscription to Vimeo and embed the tutorials in HD in my website.
A free Vimeo account only allows SD videos to be embedded which I consider not suitable in terms of viewing quality and ideally I don't want people to leave my sites when accessing content.
I have quite some webspace though and unlimited traffic, so there's little reason to not use this other than figuring out which player etc.
Do you have suggestions of players which are "must haves"? Thanks guys.
Cheers,
Martin
For simple, straightforward video (i.e. no "chapters", etc.), something like JWPlayer (http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/), FlowPlayer (http://flowplayer.org/), or Video.js (http://videojs.com/). If you're using Wordpress for your site, there are existing video plugins available that would probably be easiest (e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-video-gallery/ ), and no reason not to host on your own if you have the space and bandwidth allowance available.
If you want to have chapters or other aspects that are not just basic video playback, it gets more complicated.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan :)
My website is made with WordPress.
(First I tried with Joomla, but somehow I couldn't get my head wrapped around on how to get started and with WordPress everything fell in place right from the beginning....for me)
I'll have a look at your suggestions and make a decision soon :)
Cheers,
Martin
Another option to those that I use for convenience's sake is to upload the files to Vimeo and host them there, copying the necessary code back into your Wordpress page for each one. With Vimeo Pro you can even restrict it so that only you have the right to embed the videos and that way they're on your site and not on Vimeo.com as a free for all. ;)
Just my 50c but I found it way less hassle.
Just a note from one of the far flung corners of the galaxy - Zimbabwe. Text tutorials would be super helpful for people who live in countries whose internet bandwidth is limited and erratic. Seeing as you are intending to write transcripts anyway, perhaps you could have a separate page where people could download the transcripts for the videos if they wanted to?
Looking forward to this whatever happens!
Thanks for the suggestions guys.
Quote from: funkfather on January 31, 2013, 02:37:57 PM
Just a note from one of the far flung corners of the galaxy - Zimbabwe. Text tutorials would be super helpful for people who live in countries whose internet bandwidth is limited and erratic. Seeing as you are intending to write transcripts anyway, perhaps you could have a separate page where people could download the transcripts for the videos if they wanted to?
Looking forward to this whatever happens!
I wasn't planning to do so, but I recognize the issues you would have with accessing the materials.
I'll see how I can fix this, as I indeed do write transcripts, but they're not 1:1 with the spoken words.
Also they don't contain descriptions about what I do and all the settings etc. etc.
So to make such a transcript really useful for non-video purposes would mean to convert the video into a lot of detailed text and I'm not sure if I feel up to that.
Let's see how things work out and I can always send you some text I work from and then see if you find it valuable.
Cheers,
Martin
Please continue here :)
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15807.0.html