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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: paulcurtis on November 28, 2021, 02:11:30 PM

Title: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: paulcurtis on November 28, 2021, 02:11:30 PM
Hi All,

Another newbie question. Where are people usually sourcing trees and plants from? There are choices from turbo squid, there's SpeedTree and Xfrog too - perhaps others?

Does terragen support animation within the trees - thinking about wind?

Also some of the models rely on leaves that are mapped, but something like obj doesn't really support that properly so is there a guide as to what kinds of models terragen works best with? The docs are find about creating populations and that side of things but a little less forthcoming on the practicalities of sources of objects...

Really appreciate it, thanks
Paul
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: WAS on November 28, 2021, 05:27:50 PM
Also Plant Factory for plants/modeling plants. I also use TreeIt (Free) for basic plants I need.

But let's get to the root of your object issues. As far as importing Objects, Terragen really only works with Objects and LWO besides its native binary object format (TGO). Xfrog has volumes that are in TGO format. However I make many alternates and variants so I use the OBJ format and save my own TGOs.

What is actually happening with leaves that are not really supported? It sounds like something that may just not be set up correctly.
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: Dune on November 29, 2021, 02:22:16 AM
I mainly use Speedtree nowadays, but also used XFrog extensively earlier on. There are ways to animate trees in TG. As early as 2012: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15184.msg147853.html#msg147853  (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15184.msg147853.html#msg147853)
And there's much more to find if you use the search function.
To have obj work the way you want, you could take the obj's through Poseray and export with displacement maps and such. But usually you have to manually relink maps in TG, and adjust settings. Then save as tgo (which saves all settings and additional shaders inside the object) or as a tgc (which will use the original obj).
I always use tiff's for color, btw. with the alpha channel for opacity. And a greyscale (no alpha) tif for bumpmapping, and/or reflectivity.
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: WAS on November 29, 2021, 03:07:19 AM
Quote from: Dune on November 29, 2021, 02:22:16 AMI always use tiff's for color, btw. with the alpha channel for opacity. And a greyscale (no alpha) tif for bumpmapping, and/or reflectivity.

You can also just load up the colour TIF into TG as a Image Map Shader, and use the Colour to Greyscale shader to get your black and white version. Alpha shouldn't matter if you're masking by the same TIF's alpha. This is how I often my colour variants like dead parts of leaves, or whole dead sections of trees to get a whole new colour setup, like the dying parts, and the dead dark brown parts.
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: masonspappy on November 29, 2021, 03:58:44 AM
Quote from: Dune on November 29, 2021, 02:22:16 AMI always use tiff's for color, btw. with the alpha channel for opacity.
Is there an advantage to using TIF over PNG?
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: Dune on November 29, 2021, 05:40:56 AM
Quote from: masonspappy on November 29, 2021, 03:58:44 AM
Quote from: Dune on November 29, 2021, 02:22:16 AMI always use tiff's for color, btw. with the alpha channel for opacity.
Is there an advantage to using TIF over PNG?
I don't think so, but saving as LZW compressed saves some space (which is hardly necessary today, but well...

Regarding the grey tif; I usually make a bumpmap in Pixplant, so it's not just a greyed version of the color tif. But the convert method is great for fall leaves indeed.
Title: Re: Sources of trees and plants
Post by: digitalguru on November 29, 2021, 06:58:53 AM
Quote from: paulcurtis on November 28, 2021, 02:11:30 PMDoes terragen support animation within the trees - thinking about wind?

I think this is a good case for the MDD format (Motion Designer Deformer) which stores vertex animation.
I've just got it working coming out of Maya, and have tested it on simple objects so far, but an animated tree would be a good test to see how it holds up :)