Planetside Software Forums

General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: semuta on February 17, 2009, 09:22:36 PM

Title: Exporting Clouds
Post by: semuta on February 17, 2009, 09:22:36 PM
Hey all, I'm trying to find out if it's at all possible to export a .lwo of the geometry generated for 3d clouds. has anybody done this? can the lwo micro exporter handle this? it would be a great option for making Terragen more animation/production friendly.

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone has!


Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: old_blaggard on February 17, 2009, 09:59:27 PM
Unfortunately, you can't export clouds at this time. My advice would be to try to match camera paths and render the clouds in TG2 and your other stuff in your other 3D application.
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: rcallicotte on February 18, 2009, 07:41:04 AM
I wonder if it's possible to export the meta-clouds that DandelO figured out.
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: old_blaggard on February 18, 2009, 09:13:00 AM
Those were just plain old clouds, based around a different planet from the original to give you more control of their placement (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't think that they would be exportable either.
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: semuta on February 18, 2009, 02:00:28 PM
ok, good to know,thanks for the definitive answer, It would be great to be able to project some hi res clouds back onto some geometry in another piece of software for some quick rendering.. maybe one day, I can work with rendering the clouds in terragen though I think. If i can keep everything from flickering that is... anyways, thanks for the info!
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: dandelO on February 18, 2009, 02:10:42 PM
No, you can't export planets, at this point in time, at least.
My Metas are just planets with surface rendering disabled.
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: Oshyan on February 18, 2009, 10:52:14 PM
Semuta, to stop flickering try high values of GI Blur Radius, 100-300 for example.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Exporting Clouds
Post by: Matt on February 19, 2009, 03:39:03 AM
We have some improvements in the works which are able to virtually eliminate GI flickering in the clouds if you set the GI quality levels high enough. In the current release it is unfortunately very difficult to do this, although higher GI blur radius does help somewhat.

Exporting the clouds as geometry is not possible because they are defined by a volumetric function, and we don't currently have any means to generate isosurfaces or anything like that from the volumetric function.

Matt