First, I know that TG2 is unique. It's very good and useful beyond our enhanced imaginations.
Once the Beta is complete, would Planetside please address the limited 16 textures for objects and provide us a better object handling system? If so, please acknowledge us here. Plants are fine, but other objects beyond the use of plants are desired to take advantage of TG2's excellent renderer.
To say it's okay to not support what Vue is supporting seems to put Planetside in a disproportionate landscape of software tools used for the media industry. Doesn't it? This article seems to point favorably to Vue - http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/spotlights/?page=1 in this spotlight.
agree terragen outclasses vue in every sence except animation and object capability's i think this is one of the major draw backs with terragen 2
also a request from me would be wireframed preview of objects in the quick preview window :)
Oooh, wireframes, nice!!
And a visible campath...
All in good time.. I hope..
Addressing the 16-bit texture limit and wireframe previews are both very high on our list of priorities.
Matt
Quote from: calico on April 26, 2008, 10:12:36 AM
To say it's okay to not support what Vue is supporting seems to put Planetside in a disproportionate landscape of software tools used for the media industry. Doesn't it? This article seems to point favorably to Vue - http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/spotlights/?page=1 in this spotlight.
Our main goal is not to match Vue feature for feature. Vue is a successful product for many reasons, but it doesn't directly influence our development strategy. Our aim is to concentrate on developing Terragen 2 in ways that take the most advantage of its unique abilities (and ours). We will address the 16-texture limitation and improve object handling, but to avoid "not supporting what Vue is supporting" is equivalent to saying "support everything that Vue is supporting", and that's neither feasible nor the best application of our strengths.
Matt
A word of warning about wanting wire frame previews: (From a Personal Perspective). ;D
As you may know the idea of wire frame previews of object placement in terrain software is not a new one, indeed Bryce uses this method and from my experience with Bryce a few things to say on the subject of wire frames:
Problem 1: Bryce when dealing with dense object groups (Bryce 5.0 and before) made using the Multi-Replicate feature would tend to become sluggish due to the number of objects in the scene (Solved in TG2 Due to instancing) and would resort to just showing the bounding boxes rather than the objects them selfs.
Problem 2. In Bryce dense object groups (A numerical value of 100 or more in Multi-Replicate) in some cases it became hard to select individual objects since Bryce didn't have any kind of management system, that would have allowed fast selection of individual objects allowing them to be moved to some where else.
Problem 3. The Wire Frame Mode in Bryce when dealing with complex terrains and lots of dense object groups such as trees quickly became visually confusing with the wire frames been a single color its quickly lead to situations where due to the shear density of wire frames, you had trouble distinguishing where one stopped and another began, this was vary true if you had an object you wish to move, but there where several to the side and in front of it, Etc.
I hope that when developing the wire frame preview for Terragen lesions can be learned from the above?
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel ;D
Thanks Matt. The clearer Planetside's vision of who they are, and who Planetside is becoming, the clearer I will know how to utilize your tool(s). I appreciate your giving us the opportunity to understand everything we can.
Thanks Matt, we'll be eagerly waiting for that!
@ CA: If you can toggle between 'not visible', 'bounding box only' and 'full wireframe' for every object or population, a lot of the problems you mentioned would be solved. Add a colour option and you're done, right?
To be honest, I'm not sure this is a priority. I certainly don't want complex meshes cluttering and blocking my preview. Why can't people make a proxy, that is a simplistic version of their model, for positioning? When that's in the right place, etc, simply replace the object file with the hero model for a check, a tweak, and a final render. But if it must be done then there perhaps should be a double file load in the object's importer node - a simple proxy created by the user (there's no such thing as a free lunch), and the hero model for rendering.
Things like making sure a mesh's normals work flawlessy, being able to undulate a cloud layer either randomly or based on rules, defining clouds by 3D shapes, random colour variation across populations, are far more desirable for an environment app IMHO. Anything else I can work around for sure.
If I'd wanted Vue's features I'd be using Vue ;)
Quote from: JimB on April 28, 2008, 07:44:04 AM
If I'd wanted Vue's features I'd be using Vue ;)
I don't want Vue's features! >:( VUE, BAH! I want all developers and film makers to have to use Terragen!!! ;D
But I do like some more compatibility, so I really won't need vue. If I want to render a building I made in a nice environment, then I'd like to actually get the building into the environment, in the right spot, correctly alligned with other object or buildings, and a wireframe would make that a lot easyer.
However, if a proxy does the job... But could you explain to me what a proxy is, exactly? Is it a terrain displacement, so I can see the shape or outline of my Hero object?
A proxy would be a low res shell model (stand-in) that fills the footprint and size of the HERO model. A least that is my interpretation of a proxy.
Spot on sonshine777. If you were using a building for example, you would create your "Hero" model, say in 3DS. At the same time, you could create just an untextured cube (or set of connected cubes if your building is "an interesting shape") the same size and general shape of your building and export both. Place your "cube building" in your scene, rotate it, scale it check shadows are in the right place and that it doesn't obscure any part of the scene you particularly want to be visible and then substitute the finished model for the cube model.
Miles
But, any cubes or piramid roofs or any other shape of the proxy would still not be visible, only by bounding box.
So we'd still need some form of wireframe to get mulitiple models together or other things we might need to do...
So the proxy would only fix the 'cluttered preview' problem, because there are less lines that clutter the screen.
A fair point. I still think it's not a high priority, but my needs are probably different to yours. I know I can take a camera mesh export of a terrain from TG and put it in (for example) XSI, and then position an object in there far more easily than in TG2. I then export the object for importing into TG2.
To clarify what I mean by proxy (kind of):
Proxy: http://www.3d-canvas.com/images/TutorialBlockModeling3-11.gif
Hero: http://www.3d-canvas.com/images/TutorialBlockModeling4-7.gif
What I think I really want to suggest is that Matt et al's time is fairly limited, and I believe there are other major things to concentrate on.
Sure, you're right about that... Matt also said it was high on the to do list, not that they were already working on it, or would be going to soon. ;)
Jim, would you explain this? I'm using Modo and Silo, mostly. So, this might be a problem. Nevertheless, you can pretend I have XSI in your explanation, if you have time.
"I know I can take a camera mesh export of a terrain from TG and put it in (for example) XSI, and then position an object in there far more easily than in TG2. I then export the object for importing into TG2."
I second calico an explanation of that process would be great.
Quote from: JimB on April 28, 2008, 12:19:04 PM
I know I can take a camera mesh export of a terrain from TG and put it in (for example) XSI, and then position an object in there far more easily than in TG2. I then export the object for importing into TG2.
I missed that part...
I actually tried that camera view mesh export... It failed! Every mesh you export has huge gaps in it, even the top view.
I made 9 renders of the same terrain from all the angles. I still missed about a quarter of the polygons!
So I don't know if that's the best way...
Quote from: Mohawk20 on April 28, 2008, 05:11:08 PM
Quote from: JimB on April 28, 2008, 12:19:04 PM
I know I can take a camera mesh export of a terrain from TG and put it in (for example) XSI, and then position an object in there far more easily than in TG2. I then export the object for importing into TG2.
I missed that part...
I actually tried that camera view mesh export... It failed! Every mesh you export has huge gaps in it, even the top view.
I made 9 renders of the same terrain from all the angles. I still missed about a quarter of the polygons!
So I don't know if that's the best way...
Of course the mesh has gaps in it. You should only be using it from the camera's point of view, which means you have to copy the settings of the TG2 camera to your other 3D app's camera (bear in mind some apps use different co-ordinate systems, but they're often pretty straightforward to compensate for). Then you position your model on the visible terrain, then export the model with frozen offsets (all centres/pivots are at 0,0,0) and take it into TG2.
Hmmm, that seems way to much work... but it would probably do the trick.
Still a simple internal visualisation solution would be better.