Integrating Terragen with Vue ?

[cyphyr]

Has anyone had any experience of doing this?  I realise of course that this may not be a popular question but nonetheless it may be useful to be able to do.  Pureists will say no doubt that everything should be rendered in just the one application but an art director may have different views (and he'll be signing off the cheque!)  A Terragen sky with a Vue landscape for example, or the reverse of course.  I know many cases of Terragen being used in films just for its skies for example but I've never heard of using the only two landscape rendering programs together. 
Render layers and elements will allow the tow programs to seamless integrate together (I think) butcan anyone think of any issues that may come up combining the two work flows?
Cheers
Richard

[TheBadger]

Hi richard. I don't HAve any practical immediate use for the workflow you describe (I don't even have vue). But I am curious about it from a  Shove as much stuff into my brain as I can, perspective.

I have read here in the forums on a number of occasions, of how users who are clearly proficient with Terragen, also use Vue. Well assuming they also are good with vue, then why do they use the one over the other, and when? And if one does better for certain things than the other, how to get the best from each and use them together?

Like I said, I am just interested in this from a archiving important information standpoint. (who knows, maybe Ill have to use vue sometime because thats what a boss makes me use)

So hope someone who has info can find some time to write up a overview for this workflow.

Multiple soft workflows is one of the most important subjects to have a good understanding of, I have found, in my limited experience.

[Paul]

In my experience I find TG excels in distant terrains. By using various fractals with distance shaders you can quickly make multiple layer of hills/mountains with great depth. It is much more difficult to get foreground terrain looking good, especially near the camera. It takes many adjustments to get the ground texture looking good. That's where Vue works well and can be populated very quickly using the Paint Ecosystem tool. I use the camera backdrop option to place the TG image behind a Vue foreground. You can also control the shadows/lighting on the foreground easier. To get the sun shining in the same direction you need to subtract the TG heading from 360 to get the Vue azimuth. Attached is a quick example.

[Dune]

I don't know Vue (how easy/hard it is), but in TG you can create such foregrounds with a few PF's just as nice and easy, IMHO. But I'm hooked anyway 

[mhaze]

I absolutely agree with Dune but then I'm biased

[mhaze]

I have created Hf in Vue and metablob objects too and exported them to TG works well.  You can use the full range of vue noise when creating hfs then add TG pfs and other stuff.

[TheBadger]

M,
Can you post an image showing what you did? Or would it not really be useful for the discussion? Im curious what kinda extra power that may give us.

[mhaze]

Not really as I found the process tedious and I wasn't at that time prepared to make the effort to master the process - just look at some good vue images and imagine them in TG

[DannyG]

I have to agree with Dune in regards to foreground detail in Terragen being possible, in fact I think procedually Terragen mops the floor with Vue giving far better detailed realism close to the camera than Vue. To me Vue's proceduals have a bit of a plastic type look to them where as Terragen just excels. That being said the idea of exporting Vue's metablobs into Terragen is exciting, I'll have to give that a go tonight.

[Paul]

Another good reason to use TG and Vue together is animation.  I'm working on a 1 hour long SCI FI movie at 1280X720 resolution. A 8 sec clip rendered totally in TG would take 80 hours at .425 detail and 2 antialias. By rendering the 1 background frame in TG and the foreground and ship in Vue I can do the same 8 sec clip in 5 hours with much better control of lighting.  See the 2 stills attached. As I stated before you can't beat TG for realistic depth and quick composing of infinite background scenes but Vue is much quicker and easier to  compose animations and close to the camera terrains. Why not use the best features of both together?

[TheBadger]

Thats a pretty practical argument Paul.
Time is really important.

Its hard to argue against such a straight forward pragmatic reason for your workflow.

My only problem is that I like image 1 better (just my self). I think it looks much more real. IF it were me, I would have added a bounce light on the ship and controlled the lighting more like a studio photographer in TG rather than do a more complex workflow.

But your statements about rendering times are just a fact. IF it takes too long for us to render, than nothing gets done anyway, regardless of realism.
So for us little guys who don't have money for render farms and such, and we have to render everything on one or two PCs, then I think you have a very very good point.