exporting geometry, no heightfield generator in tree?

[coremelt]

Hi, I've used the "Ben McDuff" tutorial as a starting point for learning Terragen.  Got a basic snowy mountain that I'm happy with and now I want to try and work on some back and forth Terragen <-> Nuke.  I want to animate the camera in nuke, bring that back into Terragen, then render out a fly pass and composite an object on top of the mountain peak.

First problem, the node network that I've created using that tutorial as a starting point has no heightfield generator nodes?  It's all done using height field shaders?  So how can I export the geometry in order to animate the camera?  There is nowhere to attach the "heightfield export LWO" node?

Second, Terragen can only export LWS and LWO files, Nuke can only read in FBX or OBJ files.  Anyone suggest a good convertor that runs on Mac OS X?

[Matt]

You might try the Micro Exporter. This allows you to export the actual displaced surfaces that are rendered, by rendering an image (perhaps a lower detail image) and exporting the very micropolygons that are generated during the render. The Micro Exporter can export to OBJ, LWO or TGO - this is determined from the extension you give the filename.

Set up a render with a camera that shows the part of the terrain you'd like to export, set the render detail fairly low to begin with (say 0.1), and then follow the instructions here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12166.msg122785#msg122785

More reading here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=13749.msg135125#msg135125

Matt

[coremelt]

Ok great that works fine.  I managed to get a relatively light low poly obj into Nuke by setting the detail to 0.02, that gave me 10000 polys or so.
Is there any way to bring the initial camera position out of Terragen into Nuke?  Thing is you start the animation finding a nice view, then I want to set the initial Nuke camera to that view, then animate from there.

No way to write the Terragen camera with .chan files?

[N810]

This might help. 

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11638.0

[FrankB]

There is also a little and free tool from our NWDA Community Store, that might be helpful in one way or another: http://store.nwdanet.com/terragen2store/24-tools/56-tg2-chan-export.html

Frank

[Matt]

@N810, Frank: Nuke writes Nuke .chan files directly - no plugins needed. Coremelt is asking how to get a chan from Terragen to Nuke.

@coremelt: Right now there isn't an exporter but I'm working on this. You can do this manually for a single view by following these rules:

Camera position (translate):
Terragen X, Y, Z <-> Nuke X, Y, -Z

Camera rotation:
Terragen X, Y, Z <-> Nuke X, -Y, -Z
The rotation order in Nuke will need to be set to ZXY.

FOV:
Default Terragen camera is set to "horizontal FOV", and this will be used regardless of vertical FOV or vertical aperture setting. If you have it set to "vertical FOV" then you can probably copy that directly into Nuke because I think Nuke defaults to vertical FOV, but the focal length and film back/aperture settings probably won't be the same. This isn't necessarily important, but if you want to get focal length and aperture settings to be identical then it might be a good idea to decide what your aperture x,y should be in Nuke, copy those to Terragen, then choose "vertical FOV". I think everything should work the same in both apps if you do that.

Matt

[coremelt]

Thanks again.  Incredibly fast and helpful support from Planetside.  The quality of your support is definitely a factor in me deciding to use Terragen for this project over other solutions.

I'll try and post something here of a complete Terragen <-> Nuke workflow when I have some more time to test later this week.