Is it possible to "render to texture" with TG2? If not, can I set the camera to top view and render it "manually"?
The idea is to apply the texture to a heightmap for game level design.
You'll have to do it manually. Depending on the game rendering options you may find turning shadows off useful, and there's also a visualise normals node which may also be useful for lighting within the game.
Render to Texture would be nice, as would Render to Disk and Bake GI to Texture, but its alright if these things are implemented (Development time and resources permitting) after the first commercial release of TG2.
The last two would also be of benefit in production as well as game content development.
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel
Ok, how do I set the camera to top view?
And...is there a quick way to create a shader similar to this:
http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/Bilder/final2.jpg
(For instance readymade shaders that I can import)
if they are readymade then they would be in TGC (Terragen Clip file) format....
check file sharing section...
Hey, Terragen 2 is capable of rendering all sorts of great textures. If you're doing what I think you're doing, then just set the camera X rotation to -90 so you're looking at the ground. The advanced distribution looks very good in high-res texture form.
But If you're actually trying to render a large portion of the planet from a top view...I wouldn't know how to do that. Maybe put all your shaders--including terrain--on one big plane would work, but then again, I'm new to this! I spend most of my time tinkering with trial and error.
Hi,
Lets say I want to render a heightfield for a texture. The heightfield is 10000m x 10000m, which is default setup when you start TG2.
Go to the Render Camera. Change the position to 5000, 10000, 5000. This will centre the camera on the camera, 10000m above it. Change the camera rotation to -90, 0, 0. This will make it look straight down. Click the Orthographic radio button. Click the "Use ortho width" radio button. Set the ortho width to 10000. This means that the camera will show an area 10000m wide, which is the whole width of the terrain.
Now go back to the renderer you want to use, lets say Full Render. Set the image size to be square ( 1000 x 1000 say ). This will give you a square image showing the entire heightfield. Uncheck the "Atmosphere visible" checkbox if you don't want there to be any atmospheric effects in the render. Hit the Render Image button and you will get an image rendered you can use as a texture, draped over a heightfield.
Obviously this is pretty low-res, with a 10000 x 10000 heightfield and a 1000 x 1000 pixel image each pixel is going to represent 10m. TG2 can't render particularly large images right now, I'm not sure what the maximum size is myself. I think it would be fairly easy to write something which would animate the camera across the terrain, rendering smaller parts of it at higher resolution. You would need to purchase the registered version with the animation module though. You could do it manually, if you were patient enough :-).
I've attached an image I rendered using the technique described above, except I did it at 640 x 640.
Regards,
Jo
Hi,
I have a question (... for developers, I think).
What about rendering to texture whole planetary surfaces? I mean, will it be possible doing this in the next TG2 release?
Quote from: halu on November 20, 2007, 09:26:45 AM
Ok, how do I set the camera to top view?
[...]
If you are interested in texture-rendering a particular terrain located far away from origin point (i.e. bottom left of default heightfield shader), you might use something like this stuff I wrote, to locate your camera:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2682.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2682.0)
This will be added after we have implemented a spherical camera (planetary texture rendering can be done using a modified version of a spherical camera that renders a planet inside out). This will not make it into 2.0 this year but it will be done next year.
Matt
Also keep in mind that even when it's possible it will take images of tremendous resolution to provide much detail. A large part of the value of TG2 as a renderer is its ability to show a wide range of detail levels using procedurals. These procedurals, like those in any other program, can't be exported, so you have to render in TG2 to fully take advantage of them. This is what allows you to have a detailed orbital view that can also be seen from ground level while maintaining a high level of detail. If you were to use an exported planet map, even at say 32,000x32,000 things would still be a blurry or pixellated mess at ground level. Spherical/planetary map exports will be useful for long distance shots, placeholders and other matching techniques, but I wouldn't rely on them for primary rendering.
- Oshyan
1) What about the concept of rendering a very high resolution texture in Terragen 2, then bring that into photoshop. Now export the LWO land object and bring it into Lightwave 3D then make an overhead (faced) UV map. At this point take a snap of that UV and bring that also into photoshop and lay it under the highres terragen texture then pull that into your app your using for your games landscape?
2) Is there a way to pull up a screen to see the full details on the procedurals setups in Terragen 2 so that one could setup the same in their 3D app, like Lightwave 3D, to achieve the same results?
I need this for Games as well, Crysis mod and PIM ( http://www.pimtools.be )
I'm just thinking out loud of how i can squeeze all the beauty out of Terragen 2 out to a game...
The beauty of rendering to texture can not really be achieved by setting up a camera.
If for example I would like to get a texture of an object inside TG2, and not just the terrain, I would have to set up multiple shots and then try to stich them up.
It would be nice to have this automatically done.
Is there a workaround until this would be implemented in TG2?