Making a Terragen Tutorial

[insignet]

Hi

Is it OK to create a YouTube tutorial showing Terragen 2.5 using the free version?
I've not made a tutorial yet, but wanted to know in case I'm nuked by Planetside after the fact

Ian.

[Tangled-Universe]

That should be no problem as long as you don't intend to make money with it, because then it's commercial use of the free version.

I haven't had much time to add more tutorials, but you can visit my website CGScenery.com for some basic tutorials. More is on its way!

Cheers,
Martin

[insignet]

Cool... Thanks Martin

Terragen exports Lightwave files but there are no examples ( only Maya and Max ) that I could find of using 2.5 with Lightwave 11.5  which has a very robust FBX implementation. Thought I'd try and show this workflow to the folks over in the Lightwave forums and beyond.

I've done a few camera matching tutorials recently http://www.youtube.com/user/insignet
I think this fits nicely into that category.

Thanks again...

Ian.

[Tangled-Universe]

Did you try the FBX export from TG2.5 already?
The .lwo export from TG2.5 is old and also exports in tiles, which always means extra work.

Great to see you're doing these tutorials to show this type of workflow!

Cheers,
Martin

[insignet]

Yes I've tried to do a test... mixed results.

Scale is a an issue when using the LW micro exporter to position the mesh in the LW scene.
I don't use Terragen on a regular basis so i'm kinda learning as I go along.

The FBX camera, light, null info works fine.

But i'm trying to find a way to bring in the mesh data to use into the LW scene effectively.

Ian

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes the scale issue you're refering to can have to do with 2 things:

1) 1 unit in TG = 1 metre, make sure you have your units in LW configured the same

2) if you export a piece of terrain 1000 metres away from 0,0,0 (origin) coordinates in TG, then it will also appear that far away from origin in LW.
If I export then I always move the region of interest to/near the origin, using a transform shader (subtract the number of metres it is away from origin).

With a bit of fiddling you should be able to get better results now?

[insignet]

thanks...

Martin is there another option to export mesh data ? OBJ for example ? Is the micro exporter used for that ?

Ian

[Tangled-Universe]

You can have the micro exporter export .obj/.fbx/.lwo(?) just by changing the filename extension to the desired output format

[insignet]

the clouds part and I see the light Thanks I was looking for a specific node for output to different formats as lw was labeled, I assumed the other would be too.



Ian

[insignet]

I'm still having trouble. you can see the nulls that I created in LW and imported into T2. Screen shot 'terragenScene.jpg'

When I export back to LW I get a good match 'LWscene_matching.jpg'. The render is a low res scene render placed in the background from T2.

When I then import the mesh from the Micro Export. The result is 'LWscene_meshimported.jpg'

I thought the mesh would match the bg render. I must be doing something wrong on the scale of the mesh object?

[insignet]

OK i  changed  the Lens Focal Length and it matched.