Hi,
I don't have terragen and i'm hoping for some presales advice really.
I need to produce some visuals, sort of animatics of a rocky island in the sea. I've seen some stunning work in the galleries so i'm pretty sure it's possible. Terragen seems to have a better renderer than vue and hopefully a better interface (i cannot stand vue's interface when i had a play of the PLE)
However, i need this animated. Now i know the animation module is in beta but it's said that all parameters are animatable but i've never seen water and waves animated. Is this actually possible? Are clouds animatable? Are the render times so stupidly long that no one in their right mind would do it this way?!
If it's not then how are people best compositing terragen with other systems. Can i bring in camera paths from elsewhere and render out layers?
If there is advice on these issues i've not found please direct me!
many, many thanks in advance
paul
Some answers -
Cameras can be exported. I don't know about imported.
Waves have been done, but sorta work "okay".
Clouds can be moved in an animation, but you might need to get more control by using Dandelo's metaclouds, which are objects and look very good.
The size and quality of your renders affect the rendering time. Some HD renders have been done, but I don't remember their render times. Maybe someone who has done the longer render could answer you.
Virtually everything is animateable, but there are no presets. You can do convincing water animation, but it will require a fair amount of manual tuning and tweaking to get right. The principles are simple however, just animate the position and shape of fractal noise functions that provide displacement for the water. Here are a couple links you might find interesting:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7896.0
Clouds can also be animated and making convincing "time lapse" animations is fairly easy with simple noise translation. You can also animate size, position, density, color, etc. Honestly I think clouds are probably one of the easiest things to animate, aside from camera motion.
Render times vary, of course. It will depend on the elements in your scene, detail settings, render resolution, and available CPU power. As a rough guide, a very complex scene at 480P on my Core i7 can render in 20-30 minutes per frame with a high level of detail and motion blur. If you have a static camera or low motion blur, you can get away with less AA and lower render times. If you have smaller populations than mine (millions of instances), again render time will go down. I could see getting frame times as low as perhaps 10 minutes with water only and a slow moving camera, on an i7 920. Going to HD 720P resolution would quadruple that.
Camera paths can be imported in Nuke's CHAN format. Other import formats are pending.
If you have any other specific questions let us know.
- Oshyan
I geuss you haven't seen any water animations yet, because they are time consuming to make (render time). This should have improved with the latest release somewhat though.
The best water animations with TG2 I've ever seen are made by Jim Bowers. You can see them here: http://s331.photobucket.com/albums/l469/jimbowers/TESTS/
Cheers,
FRank
is it XSI effect ?
Odd, I thought I had linked to Jim's thread too in my original post (you'll note it says "here are a couple links" but there's only one). Anyway, I agree that's the best example I've seen yet. But I know with some more tuning it could be even better.
- Oshyan
I've made some tests with water, but nothing really interesting for the moment... btw, are there any tips to obtain a water movement which seems "real" ?
Waves in water are cyclic. This means that the patterns repeat in a regular manner, but the deviations from wind and other factors make small variances in this behavior. In Blender, I use null objects to drive more null objects. The second set of null objects is linked to a particle system to make the small variations.
There should be a way to do this using functions with the transform shader, driven by a couple of extra cameras.
Just a not to say that the water I did was a combination of animating the water shader within TG2, but there's an additional displacement using a heightfield image sequence (4k x 4k IIRC) created using XSI's ICE editor (TD tools for artists) which has a very nice wave generator, including leading edges to the waves. What I really like is the way that, if you look closely, the waves rise with a leading edge and then disappear.
Thought that might answer some questions.
I have improved on it since, but been too sidetracked with other things to do too much with it. I'm pretty sure I can create ship wakes and breakers near shores just by controlling the amount of displacement locally and blending image sequences as masks into the displacement. The white froth happens automatically within my shader setup which I'm quite happy with at this stage.