We need your help

Started by theComedian, November 22, 2011, 06:38:20 AM

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theComedian

Dear members of Terragen 2.

Let's introduce myself. I'm Lander Van hove and I work for an international team that is remaking for free the half life 1 universe of Valve. It's called Blue shift source or Guard Duty.

We were looking for a program that can make hdr atmospheres and clouds and we found several websites. After some research we think that Terragen 2 is one of the best programs now atm for rendering atmospheres for our game.

We mailed some professional artists who are working with this program but they can't make time for us so they give us the link to this forum.

Our question is now if you could help us with creating and rendering some skies. The 3D and 2D artists in our team will add it into the source engine.

I mentioned that this is a free project. But we give you all the credits of your work and if the whole community want to help us we could link our website with this forum and promote this program to the gameworld. You may also add it to your portfolio or website.

Some examples from what we need of skies. (we found this in the gallery)




I hope you can help us to build this game and to introduce Terragen into the source engine.

Info:
Forums: www.blueshiftsource.com/community
Portfolio at moddb.com: http://www.moddb.com/mods/guardduty
Website: www.bluefhistsource.com

I thank you for your time and have a good day.

Lander

FrankB

Good luck, Lander! It's probably hard to find people for a free project. I hope you find someone, or maybe you or someone else in your group are interested in learning TG2 yourself. This forum is very active and you will be up to speed in no time with the support from this group here.

Cheers,
Frank

theComedian

#2
Hi thanks Frank.
Yes I have download the non profit version of Terragen 2 to try it on my own and this is the result of my first sky.
(My image is not so sharp on the bottem, but I think this because my render settings aren't so good)



I saw also that you can upload your files into 3D max. So you can make a model from your cloudlayer? And is it transparent?

Thanks

Lander

Tangled-Universe

No that's not possible. The clouds aren't polygons, they are a volumetric shader which can't be meshed or whatsoever.
You can export geometry from TG2 though and match TG2 camera/output to your 3d max for instance.

theComedian

So you can't make a model from your sky? Because we need for our game a sky with moving clouds in it.
You can only render images in Terragen 2 and paste it on your dome model?

Thanks

Lander

Tangled-Universe

There's no 3D-output from the sky from TG2. So you can render out animated clouds and project them onto a dome/cube in your game, but no 3D model of your sky.
However, animation is not available in the free version.

FrankB

#6
The only games that have good moving clouds seem to be rendering them in-game. But then, Half-Life isn't exactly the type of game where players sit around watching the clouds move by anyway ;)
Battlefield 3 has *awesome* skies, but even they don't move afaik.

However I have recently done a series of skyboxes that had slowly changing cloud coverage. The game was supposed to slowly fade one skydome into the next with slightly higher or lower coverage, which gave the impression of a dynamically changing sky. But no cloud movement really.

Maybe there are other solutions but I cant think of any.

Regards,
Frank

YAY - this was post number 3000 for me!!!! Scary somehow :)

theComedian

I see. Is it possible to render an image from above and make the sky transparent so you can scroll the texture? Or like you guys said something about "fake" moving clouds.

If not I must buy then the commercial version of this program (Terragen 2 with Animation: $399)=> this for the animation?

The only thing is that this is a free project I'm working for so I have to pay it with my own money and I just want to use it for this project only and I'm not a professional so I think it's alot of money for a  free project. (That's my opinion so I will think about it)


Thanks

Lander





FrankB

#8
I can't be of much more help I am afraid. Maybe someone else with more game technology experience can chime in here?

Possibly projecting a cloud animation like TU suggested is the solution, but other than that I can only imagine that your game generates it's own cloud coverage texture, like in Red Dead Redemption perhaps. Maybe there is some other technology. What are your own programmers saying? What is their prefered approach to the problem?

Regards,
Frank

Draigr

There are lots of ways to animate skys.

Battlefield 3 uses sprites and particles to generate their clouds.

Skyrim uses some very advanced techniques that I'm not familiar with to stretch and morph their multiple masked sky layers over time.

Morrowind used a conventional flatish sky texture that blended with the horizon and slowly swapped to the next texture via blending or whenever you swapped areas. Regardless, they moved the textures.

Using Terragen, theoretically you could project an animated texture to a Skydome, but that would take yonks to render and about as long the generate the Skydome.

The best method would be to create a flat lighting scene with a cloud layer that doesn't have strong contrasts and lighting effects applying to it then comp that render in photoshop and basically apply multiple layers of these to blend between them or simply have them moving together.

Either way, a moving epic shot like the one you've shown isn't even feasible for AAA development groups.

theComedian

Well the source engine use skymodels

like this:

You make a dome model in 3D-max or maya and you paste an transparant texture with clouds on it.

So maybe I can make some skies in terragen and render it for the static air and make a dome model with a transparant texture on it.

Thanks

Lander

Draigr

You could do an epic distant cloud shot which doesn't move, and then have smaller, less epic clouds that move over head via masked layers. I don't use source coz it's not a very modern engine (UDK ftw!) so I don't know how they handle multiple texture layers and masking, but it shouldn't be too hard to have multiple cloud layers. The rendering might take a little while, but you should be ok.

theComedian

Thanks

Well now I'm looking for a person who want's to render the epic shots because I don't have the full program.

Lander

Tangled-Universe

You can always create the epic shot yourself and ask someone to render it for your at epic resolution and quality :)
I'm pretty sure someone wants to do that, but like Frank pointed out there are little people interested in doing these relatively laborous things for free.

Cheers,
Martin

theComedian

I see, wel I try to make them by myself and I post here the results and then I hope someone is so kind to render them. (You get credits for it)