Well, here is a first render.
I used the Daniil Kamperov Classic Erosion addon. The rest is all basic Terragen.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/2316/GGfhkQ.png)
This is what I want to use Terragen create scenery and spherical hdr renders for:
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/3254/lpUfgC.jpg)
The aircraft was modeled in Modo and textured in Substance Painter. The Terragen render was used as a camera backplate and the Terragen spherical render was used as an environment in Modo. The final was rendered in Modo.
Dave
Nice render Dave! The plane looks really natural above the landscape.
You are quite a good modeler and fine work with the texturing as well!
Thank you. This isn't the final that's in my mind's eye. That includes at least two aircraft, perhaps 3 or 4, in different positions. Those aircraft are camouflaged brown and green. But this was a starter to see how it looked. I did send this one off to FineArtAmerica to have a phone case made with this on the back. Guaranteed that no one else has one like it.
That is one hell of a model indeed! Why not render all in TG?
Quote from: Dune on June 16, 2022, 03:36:39 AMThat is one hell of a model indeed! Why not render all in TG?
Well, I haven't gotten that far yet.
Quote from: Dune on June 16, 2022, 03:36:39 AMWhy not render all in TG?
That's what came in my mind as well.
Quote from: denders on June 16, 2022, 10:45:56 AMWell, I haven't gotten that far yet.
Well, is 100x better than my first Tg render, that's for sure haha
Quote from: Hannes on June 16, 2022, 11:20:32 AMQuote from: Dune on June 16, 2022, 03:36:39 AMWhy not render all in TG?
That's what came in my mind as well.
Well, I did an export of the aircraft from Modo to fbx, lwo, and obj.
When I import the obj into TG the textures are messed up. I think that obj only uses one texture map and the aircraft is textured using multiple udims. When I imported it back into Modo I get the same results.
When I test the lwo, it's even worse. No textures at all. At this point, Modo could be not exporting an lwo correctly.
When I test the fbx, I get nothing in TG. There's an object there but it appears that it might be rather small, perhaps I need to scale it up even more than I did. I used 39.37 in two places when importing the fbx (I have the units set in Modo to inches.) Perhaps I'll try 3937 for scaling. The other problem is that the fbx is imported in all its little pieces and it doesn't allow me to select all those pieces to be able to move and scale them all at one time.
The Modo scene has Instances (engine cylinders) and rigged characters (aircrew posing) which don't seem to translate well into some of the file types. The cylinders instances probably need to be turned into geometry. Things like the bombs and propeller have what are Item level transforms which probably need to be frozen. The posed aircrew need to be frozen too. And it would seem like the textures would need to be redone to fit into a single texture.
The aircraft can be rendered and composited into the TG render but the spherical render from TG is still necessary for lighting for the aircraft render.
So, I think I'll stick with the current process.
Dave
Hi denders,
Nice image, and it would be great to see a render from Terragen that includes the aircraft.
Just focus on exporting the aircraft from Modo as an OBJ. Terragen's Lightwave support is limited to older versions of the LWO format and importing an FBX is limited to cameras, lights and null objects (with motions). Terragen's units are 1 meter = 1 unit, so whenever possible export your FBX files with that scale.
If you can export an MDD file for your rigged characters, Terragen can read it via an object's "Read MDD file (motion)" parameter under the Mesh Modifiers tab.
UDIM's are fine to use for texture coordinates, you just need to chain the Image nodes nodes together in the object's internal node network and increment the "Position" parameter for each UDIM. See attached image.
Sounds like you've already worked out the spherical environment image for lighting the aircraft in a third party application, but here's my shameless plug for the "Terragen for VFX" videos anyways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0dtt4IusJM
03:43:13 Part 27 Spherical Environment Render
Kevin,
Thanks for the udim and the mdd info. I'll have to experiment with it. The final object is still pictures. The engine propeller and the wind powered generator propeller are the only items that are animated. That is to have some motion blur on those items. The characters aren't actually animated, they're just rigged for posing, turn heads, position hands, arms, legs, feet, etc. A quick check shows that Modo doesn't allow me to export an mdd for the characters because I haven't added animation to them. It does show the ability to export an mdd for the propellers. I'll have to experiment for those too.
I think I'll still have to convert the instances to real geometry for the engine cylinders.
I tend to work in inches/feet instead of meters or SI units, probably just because I'm a bit more 'senior'. ::) I'll see whether changing Modo's units to meters or SI makes a scaling difference on the import.
Thanks for the info on lwo and fbx. I suspect that Modo's lwo export might be in the 'older' category too. Have you folks ever looked into being able to import lxo (Modo)?
I've already watched the vfx series. That's where I looked for info on setting up the spherical camera. I took the exported exr into Affinity Photo and saved an hdr (not sure I really needed to) to use in the environment slot for Modo's renderer. It works very well. The Modo render is only lit by the environment. No other lights are active.
Dave
Quote from: Ariel DK on June 16, 2022, 12:18:05 PMQuote from: denders on June 16, 2022, 10:45:56 AMWell, I haven't gotten that far yet.
Well, is 100x better than my first Tg render, that's for sure haha
Wellll, perhaps it's the first render I'm willing to post. ;)
Thanks for the explanation of your workflow. Obj import has its pitfalls too, as you often need to adjust maps and settings to the specific TG requirements. But it's all very doable, some workflows are just faster and easier than others. But you can do a lot of extra's in TG, combining procedural dirtmaps with UV, etc.
I'm looking forward to your further renders anyway.
Wow, UDIMs possible in TG!!! I never thought that. I once had an obj textured with UDIMs and didn't find a way to do that in Terragen.
By the way,
@Kevin: you set the image map shaders to Plan Y. Shouldn't it be Object UV? Or is your screenshot just to show the shader chain?
Hi Hannes,
Good catch, yes the Projection Type should have been set to Object UV.
Kevin
When did TG FBX get cameras and lights? That was lacking before, hence the FBX2Terragen I was working on.
Hi WAS,
I'm not sure exactly when camera and lights were introduced in the FBX feature, but under Terragen's Main Menu there is an option to "Import FBX Scene", and that gives you the ability to import an FBX file and choose the asset types to import.
In the test example image I've exported an FBX file from Lightwave which contains two cameras, a distant light, a point light, a null object, and a cube. All of these items have animated motions, and each of the cameras had different settings.
As you can see Terragen imported all the items with their animations EXCEPT the cube. The distant light imported as a Sun type node and the point light imported as a Light Source node. The null imported as a null object, as expected. Each camera imported with their settings, however a renderer node is not created, so if your output image resolutions are different you'll need to create a new renderer and assign the imported camera to it.
In the example image I've noted that you need to be aware of "bad" rotation values that can happen when an item goes beyond 360 degrees for a given rotational axis. In Lightwave, this is noticeable in the graph editor when you bake out a motion channel, and is easily fixed by running the "RH Euler Filter" on the item, then exporting the FBX or CHAN file.
If the rotations are not "fixed" and they're on the camera then the motion blur will not be correct when Terragen renders the frame that jumps from 360 degrees, back to 0 degrees. This may not be such an issue on an object, since Terragen doesn't currently have object motion blur, but it's good habit to fix the rotation anyways.
Here's the link to the FBX Importer wiki page too: https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=FBX_Import:_Scene
Well, I've gotten the airframe material with it's udims into TG as can be seen in the attached image.
The airframe material actually has diffuse, roughness, specular amount, and specular color images. Obviously the diffuse is there and I've plugged in the roughness. I don't really know where I might be able to plug in the specular images. Note the circled colour image slot in the Airframe Shader (Default Shader). TG defaulted to putting one of the udims in that slot which had things messed up. It tries to use that image in all the udim slots.
I also messed with the propeller it has a lot of reflection on it. I even went back to SP to output a metallic image but that didn't seem to work for the propeller. It shouldn't be black.
Some of the aircraft items are objects imported into Modo (They are Modo files) which have their own set of udims. Perhaps that causes problems with TG because the red stripes on the propeller don't quite seem to line up correctly. At some point I'll have another go at it. I've spent quite a bit of time on it today.
But at least for those who didn't know that TG works with udims, it's been productive.
Dave
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/8615/mhusHh.jpg)
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your progress.
In Terragen many of the shader parameters are designed to work with each other. For example, the final diffuse colour is the result of the Base colour value * Colour image value * Colour function value. If you wanted the precise values from your image map you would set the Base colour vale to 1 and either assign your texture map directly to the Colour image parameter or via an Image Map Shader assigned to the Colour function parameter. Since your workflow is using UDIMs you've chosen the correct pipeline. The Base colour value of 0.48 is darkening the texture maps assigned to the Colour function parameters by about half.
Translucency, Luminosity, etc. all work in the same manner.
It sounds like you're using a PBR Specular workflow as opposed to a PBR Metallic workflow by the image maps you've described. I'll have to get back with you on which specular texture maps are assigned where (as I usually use the Metallic workflow myself), but I'm sure others on the forum may have an answer to that.
Great work.
Kevin
I don't have any experience with UDIMS but I do remember seeing this article (https://planetside.co.uk/blog/udim-workflow-in-terragen/) by Oshyan which includes a video for working with them. Might be helpful....
Thanks, I had found that video through YT while trying to figure it out. And I've not even begun to make a dent going through all the info in these forums.
I think my next thing is to understand how the renderer and materials work in TG if I'm going to render it in TG. The crew figures, for example, aren't textured with images. They're just textured with Modo textures which seem to not translate through the mtl file exported with the obj file.
If you look at the Modo render, there is light reflected and it varies based upon the specular maps that I've used. I'm thinking that I need to use a PBR metallic roughness output from Substance Painter and the unreal materials in Modo.
Dave
Hi Everyone,
After watching the referenced video, I feel that the author's solution defeats the purpose of laying out the source object's texture coordinate as UDIMs in the first place.
The advantage to UDIMs is that each texture map can be a different resolution, and because they are seen as an image sequence such as Aircraft_1001.jpg, Aircraft_1002.jpg, etc. you would only have to load/assign the texture map's base name to a single defined surface in most 3D packages.
For example, the entire aircraft surface could be named "Aircraft". The geometry defining the fuselage could be laid out across UDIM space 1 and be assigned a 4k texture map, while the geometry defining the landing gear tire could be laid out across UDIM space 2 and be assigned a 512 x 512 texture map because it requires less detail.
Additionally from an organizational point of view, using UDIMs can result in having less stuff to keep track of.
If you've imported a model into Terragen that uses UDIMs, loading each texture map in an Image Map shader and offsetting it's position as described above is currently the recommended way to apply the textures to the existing surface.
If you're importing a model into Terragen that already uses UV coordinates, then each surface of the object will show up in its internal node network and allow you to assign the texture maps to it.
Dave, as a starting point take a look at the documentation for Terragen's Default shader 4.5, as it can provide a PBR solution with the texture maps you can export from Substance Painter or other paint packages.
https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Default_Shader_4.5
In order to preserve your Modo textures, you would probably need to bake them out to a uv mapped image and then apply the resulting texture map in Terragen as usual.
Thanks, Kevin.
I agree with you about that video.
I'll check out that info on the Default Shader 4.5 and I'll have to check out baking out specific textures in Modo. I'm sure it's there, just, I've not done it before.
Just for reference, most of the airframe is a texture by that name and it is spread over 3 4k udims.
I'll probably not be able to check it out 'til next week, we're away this week.
Dave
Nice work.
Another render. I've exported PBR Metallic files from SP and they're all set up in TG. The results are this render. I still have settings to update to match what I'm looking for.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/6669/64lAmK.png)
Questions about animation in TG. Modo does not export an MDD file.
1. Can I animate a part of the imported object? (Propeller and wind generator propeller)
2. Can I animate an imported object? As in importing just the propellers and positioning them.
3. Can I somehow move the propeller out of the "Aircraft" object as another object, but still have it parented to the "Aircraft" so that it would translate with the aircraft? And then be able to animate the propeller?
Thanks
Dave
Hi Dave,
You could import just the propellers, position them where they belong in relationship to the aircraft, and animate their rotation. If the propellers are currently part of the aircraft object geometry, you'll have to separate them first, then bring them in as separate objects. You'll probably want the propellers to be saved at the origin in the 3D application. Currently, Terragen does not have parenting, so you can't parent the propeller object to the aircraft and then translate the aircraft and have the propellers follow along. Also please note that Terragen only has camera motion blur, not object blur, so the rotating propeller blades won't have motion blur.
I think you may have mentioned that your intent was to generate still images, and if that's the case the easiest thing would be to manually position the propellers where they belong, and then rotate them. You could have a version of your aircraft with propellers in the project to use as a template, in order to line up the propellers exactly where they belong, and then disable the template aircraft.
If you're planning on rendering image sequences with an animated aircraft/propellers and camera, I'd be happy to outline that workflow, but it's similar to the first few sections in the Terragen for VFX videos.
If you want blurred props, the best way would be to use an image map (of a blurred prop) instead of the props and projected on a plane/card or flat object mesh, and use a non-reflective glass shader to make the rest transparent.
An interesting thread is this: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15018.0.html (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15018.0.html)
So, I thought I'd share these. The final render is from Modo but the back plate and environment for each was created in TG.
"Dave"s over China
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/7351/dLOjAI.jpg)
During the Japanese/Chinese war prior to the US being involved in WW2, this type of aircraft operated from a float plane tender (ship) or from along a shoreline, like a river.
Hide and seek at Midway
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/5084/NtVAJL.jpg)
They were also catapulted from larger combat ships such as Battleships and Cruisers.
I would like to create another picture showing several of these aircraft lined up along a riverbank as I hinted when I thanked Dune for the Beach water scene as a source of learning. I think it will be necessary to render that one in TG to get the interaction with the water and riverbank to work out. But it won't require having the propeller motion. It will create a lot of work bringing in all the materials for all the aircraft. Note that all four aircraft (four aircraft models) in the top picture have slightly different airframe materials.
Thanks for looking
Dave
Great renders and models! And interesting to learn a bit about them. Curious to see such a riverscape, so I wish you luck building it.
From a book on IJN Seaplanes. Text is all in Japanese. (No, I can't read Japanese but the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words. It still would be nice to be able to read the caption anyway.) ;)
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/7637/0RJObu.jpg)