Hi forum,
If I am trying to make an animated panorama/skybox, how would you name the GI cache files so that they read blend properly, without running into seams when you form the panorama?
Making skyboxes uses 6 GI cache files (one for each camera). You blend all six cache files (of a single frame) when you render the six views, so that you don't get seams. Let's say you name them boxcacheA001, boxcacheA002, ...boxcacheA006.
Now you want to render every nth frame of the animation, making GI cache files to blend over time, so the animation does not flicker. You can't use the previous naming system. How would TG2 know that boxcacheA007 is actually cameraview 1, frame 2?
Would you instead name each camera differently, such as cameraA001, cameraB001, ...cameraF001, then make caches for every nth frame, and then blend each camera's own GI caches? Would this not still leave potential seaming problems in a single panorama, as the full panorama (from the six individual views) is not using the full 6-view blended cache?
It seems like you need to somehow blend all 6 single-frame view-caches into one cache, then blend those full-360 view caches with other frames in the animation to get seamless-panoramas + flicker-free animations.
Could TG2 read a file name such as "boxcache_cam1_frm001", and blend it with both "boxcache_cam[2thru 6]_frm001" and "boxcache_cam1_frm[010,020,030]"?
Thanks,
-Matt
There might be a way to do this by blending 12 (or maybe 18) GI caches, but I'm not sure.
In the next major version of Terragen we'll have a spherical camera option so you can just write out a 360-degree cache for each frame (or sparse frame).
Matt
Awesome.
This is off-topic, but in the next release of TG, will there be population caching and/or render layers available?
Thanks,
-Matt
Yes indeed, and good timing on the question! :D
www.terragen3.com
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16213.0.html
- Oshyan