Export to Maya

[sz200]

Can someone point me in the proper direction of how to export a scene to Maya and import in?  I can't seem to find anywhere a place to Export, let along choose Saving as an .OBJ.

[sz200]

Sorry probably should have been more clear that I want to export the landscape geometry.

[Oshyan]

To export terrain geometry, use a micro exporter. Documentation is here: http://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Micro_Exporter

- Oshyan

[sz200]

Finding this program or the docs not very user friendly.  Or maybe I am just missing something...

The easiest way to create a Micro exporter is to use a Render node. Follow these steps:
Go to the Sequence/Output tab of the Render node.
Click the Assign button (green plus icon) to the right of the Micro exporter parameter.
.......

Where is the Assign button to the right of the Micro exporter parameter in the image attached?

[Oshyan]

As you can see, you don't even have the Micro Exporter field (so no place for the "Assign" button to be), and that's likely because you're either using the free version or Terragen 3 Creative, while geometry export is a feature only of the Professional version. You can see a full breakdown of features by version here:
http://planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-product-comparison
If you need to evaluate geometry export for a potential commercial purchase we'd be happy to provide a time-limited Professional version license for that purpose. Just contact us at support@planetside.co.uk.

- Oshyan

[sz200]

So after adding the micro exporter, I would simply just click Render Image?  Where does it ask to save out location or type of files to save as?  I never got to that part.  It seems to error back with the following image

[TheBadger]

Quoted from T-U

The object will be placed in the same coordinates and scale as in Terragen 2.
That will mean that if your exported terrain is far away from the origin in TG2 (origin in TG2 is coordinates 0,0,0) that it will also be far away from the origin in max and probably not visible upon importing because it's outside the default viewport.

How to deal with this:
1) It's best/easiest to set up your scene and camera in TG2.
2) Then write down camera coordinates. For example 1500, 20, 300.
3) Create a "transform shader" in TG2 and hook it up as the very last shader before the planet-node. Make sure you use the connect at the right for the transform shader.
4) Inside the transform shader set the translate values to -1500, 0, -300.
5) Go to your camera and change the coordinates to 0, 20, 0.
6) Now both terrain and camera are aligned the exact same way as before but only at the origin coordinates except for altitude/Y. This works well enough.
7) Export and import terrain and it should show up.

create a "micro exporter" `(right mouse button -> create other -> micro exporter)
9) double click on it and set the filename to something like "terrain.obj" (it automatically saves it as obj then)

The near and farthest settings control the distance over which TG2 will output the geometry.
The output of the geometry is based on what your render camera sees.

So what also works well is a 90 degrees down facing camera at 0, Y, 0 where Y is an appropriate altitude from where it can "see" the portion of the terrain you want to be exported.
If the altitude of your camera is 1000m then set farthest distance to something a bit bigger, say 1500m. Then all geometry up to 1500m away from the camera will be exported.

10) Once the micro exporter is configured you need to enable the export in the render node, so go to the render node
11) In the last tab, called "sequence/output", you need to enable the micro exporter by clicking on the green '+' sign then choose "assign micro handler" and choose "micro exporter 01". Don't forget to actually activate the output by checking the box to the left.

12) Now your export-camera and mesh export node are configured, all you need is to render your scene and with each render it will automatically save out the mesh. So don't forget to disable it after you're done with exporting, because.....

13) The number of triangles is determined by the render detail setting in the quality tab. For export a detail of 0.4-0.5 results in a nice mesh suitable for animating a camera-path or fluid-sims.
If you render with detail 0.8 or higher, for instance, the mesh will become VERY dense and the exported file will become very large and also will take some time.

These steps should guide you through the whole process...

[Matt]

The filename is one of the parameters that you can edit in the parameter view for the Micro Exporter node. After creating the Micro Exporter node, you can open its parameter view through the same "+" icon. Alternatively, you can find it in the render node's internal network and double click on it from there.

I'll add this step to the documentation.

Matt