Planetside Software Forums

Bug 1: The TGD file isn't reloaded when you hit "Render." Fixing now. Fixed 2/26/2012
Bug 2: Output Path not in Quotes...can't accept paths with spaces. Fixed 2/27/2012

Feature Added: Now you can choose which sides you want rendered. This is handy in case you had to cancel the rendering, power got cut off, or if you just needed to rerender one specific side.

I've been rendering skies from Terragen for quite awhile now and have suddenly been tired of all the various ways of doing it; from importing 6 camera and render nodes to using an overly complex rendering script that suddenly stopped working. So, I developed my own. Here is the Terragen Skybox Renderer:



It's quick. Small. Easy to use. Everything is self-explanatory. All the settings I wanted to modify per render are here. When rendering, another window pops up to tell you the render times of each frame. You can also cancel the entire render if you like at any time.

I'd love to hear your feedback. Since this utilizes the command line renderer, the commercial version of TG2 is required. It's also just an EXE file as I prefer portable applications. You'll also need version 4 of the .Net framework. If you find any bugs, post them here.

Awesome, thanks for sharing your dev time with the community!

- Oshyan

Very nice, RRMessiah, thanks. I've got a simple enough method for rendering out skyboxes with a few keyframes saved as a clipfile for now but I'll definitely check this out. What would be really great and would probably be the tipping point that I'd use this all the time, would be if you were able to make the AA 'customised sampling' levels editable through your tool as well. I usually always edit my AA sampling levels, as I'm a cheapskate for render time due to a low end machine. Or, does 'Replace settings with .tgd settings' do this, anyway?

Thanks a lot! :)

Thanks for the complements everyone.

Dandelo: The "replace settings" replaces all the settings exposed in the editor with ones that are in the TGD file (with the exception of resolution). Basically if you have settings you like that you set in Terragen, they aren't lost/ignored. I can get to work on the customize sampling part later today.

Don't go out your way for that, it was just an idea that I'd have liked, I'm not sure how many people find a use for the customised sampling, or even know when best to use it(I know lots of people do but many folk don't). When using ray traced atmo', for example, it's often better for me to have low minimum samples for speed, using AA=6 with 1/16 first samples is usually not much longer in render time than AA=3 at default sampling as the minimum samples are the same but with the benefit of there being more samples available if they're needed. Just a really handy option to use.
If that's all included in the 'replace settings' button, then it isn't really necessary to include it in your tool.

 I've never used customized sampling, but I built this tool to be as easy as possible on the end user. It shouldn't be a big deal to add this functionality.

It looks very good RRMessiah. Thanks :)

I have no time now but i think i will try your renderer this week .
Just curious why "exception of resolution" in the "replace settings" ?
Can you add a custom resolution (if i didn't missed it) option RRMessiah ?

Quote from: Kadri on February 26, 2012, 11:33:32 AM

It looks very good RRMessiah. Thanks :)

I have no time now but i think i will try your renderer this week .
Just curious why "exception of resolution" in the "replace settings" ?
Can you add a custom resolution (if i didn't missed it) option RRMessiah ?

Hi Kadri. Sorry for the confusion.

The custom resolution option is available. This app allows only square renders as each side of a skybox is a perfect square. You can do 128x128, 256x256, all the way to 4096x4096 if that's what you want. The choice is made via the dropdown box labeled, "Resolution of Each Side."

When you hit the "Replace Setting with TGD Settings" button, any quality settings from the TGD will be used instead of ones you manually entered into the boxes. The only one that is not replaced is the "Resolution of Each Side."

Thanks RRMessiah :)

Those who previously downloaded the renderer should update to the newer version with important fixes.

Will this work on a mac?

Quote from: TheBadger on February 28, 2012, 09:32:06 PM
Will this work on a mac?

I doubt it, but you can try it with some windows virtual machine.

Feature Added: Now you can choose which sides you want rendered. This is handy in case you had to cancel the rendering, power got cut off, or if you just needed to rerender one specific side.

This is certainly many people's wishlist, but does anyone know if/when Planetside will write a node for a true wraparound camera? It seems like one wraparound camera node would shortcut everyone's workarounds to getting a true spherical/ cylindrical skymap.

To RRMessiah: Thanks for posting the simplified skybox solution.

Quote from: FlynnAD on March 06, 2012, 12:30:41 AM
This is certainly many people's wishlist, but does anyone know if/when Planetside will write a node for a true wraparound camera? It seems like one wraparound camera node would shortcut everyone's workarounds to getting a true spherical/ cylindrical skymap.

To RRMessiah: Thanks for posting the simplified skybox solution.

A spherical camera would be welcomed. Just about every other render has one already, excluding Bryce. It would be easy to implement.

Hello RRMesiah 
Very new to Terragen and skybox. One thing I wonder is whether I can use Ptgui to put together the images rendered from your Render Skybox app? if so, is there a way to do it,have tried, but the ground picture is distorted. I have tried to combine this tutorial with your app.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=11608.0

Hi,

I haven't used this utility to generate images for a skybox but I did use  Hugin http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ to stitch together 6 square images into an equirectangular image. This image was then used as an environment map in 3DS Max.

I made sure the Horizontal field of view was slightly greater than 90 degrees.

Hope this helps

Chris

Who says this only has to skyboxes? I can think of some pretty obscure ways this could be used to make planet maps. From inverted planets.

Quote from: Henrik on June 21, 2012, 05:43:48 AM
Hello RRMesiah
Very new to Terragen and skybox. One thing I wonder is whether I can use Ptgui to put together the images rendered from your Render Skybox app? if so, is there a way to do it,have tried, but the ground picture is distorted. I have tried to combine this tutorial with your app.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=11608.0

Yes you can.  Distortion of images is usually a symptom of setting the incorrect fov or orientation of an image.

I use 90° tiles myself because they're quicker to render and you can feed them directly into a range of applications utilising "sky boxes".
The 2 critical settings for PTGui are in the Create Panorama tab.

1: Uncheck use fast transform. If this is checked you will see small black holes along the seam (especially in the corners)
2: Set the feather slider to the extreme left (Sharp). You have theoretically perfect images so there is no need to feather images at their edges. Feathering will create gaps along the seams as well.

[Edit] FWIW PTGui can also use Panorama Tools for the "rendering" (it was originally made as a GUI for Panorama Tools, hence its name) and the original version of this could also stitch images without overlap nicely.  At some point in its life it appears that the developers who continued Panorama Tools also implemented a faster transformation to improve performance... good for stitching photographs, but it leaves holes in the corners in this situation  :(. A "few" years ago I used it to stitch and re-project rendered frames on the fly such as this 180° cylindical test: http://archive.bigben.id.au/demo/pano_test.avi (http://archive.bigben.id.au/demo/pano_test.avi) Still theoretically possible with PTGui. [/edit]

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Thanks Ben
Seems Ptgui struggling to put together the images in the correct order, but if I rename them(1,2,3,4,5,6) I get it to work by trial and error method)

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Still some problem

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