My first two Terragen scenes

[james adamson]

Hi all.
At the at the start of 2020 I got loads and loads of help with getting my head round Terragen. Still a way off.
I realised on getting back onto it this week I never uploaded any results. This is brute force Terragen I think and my setups are far from elegant. Gotta get me some blue node learning!
There are numerous problems with both these clips and some more substantial post work is required and to be honest the night time scene was such a crazy render any work I am gonna have to do in Nuke. They both need optical fx and some SUBTLE lens flares I think. Anyway point is whatever faults may be in these shots, I started at the end of 2019 or thereabouts with zero knowledge of Terragen and the input from this site and the geeks at play tutorials got me way way further along the track than I would otherwise have been. It really is an indispensable forum.
https://vimeo.com/445622704
https://vimeo.com/445622706

[Dune]

Well, you posted some really nice animations! Keep up the experimentation!

[james adamson]

Thank you Dune.
Coming from a Terragen guru such as yourself with the stuff you have created that means a lot.
Just starting a new shot which should be an even bigger challenge.
I built a scene a while back in Modo and the landscape just was not cutting it, then I saw the work coming from Terragen (It was in fact this shot that prompted me to get TG.)
 So I have a small city/town to recreate in tg and i'm trying to decided on the best workflow. All my assets have been textured and laid out in Modo.
I think as TG is so good with instances, (much much more efficient than my 3d software.) I will do all that stuff in TG, my hero buildings and close detail in Modo because I will have greater control of my textures/materials. Export environment map mesh and atmosphere elements from tg and then comp.
If anyone can suggest a better way to produce this shot I would greatly appreciate it.
 I have been putting it off because it scares me to be honest but I need to get something onto my timeline sooner rather than later.
Cheers.
James.

[Dune]

You can do it two ways (and probably more); make your city layout as one object, and import in TG (it can handle huge files), or import all buildings separately and arrange in TG. For non-descript/generic buildings as 'fillings' you can use a pop and edit in place.
If you use kind of the same textures in all buildings, you could make a generic row of materials and point each part at those. Lot of work! If you have enough space and memory, it's easier to import all materals with the buildings they're baked onto.
Good luck.

[WAS]

These are really nice for first posted animations, I must say. Keep up the work.

Also, ironically, I am working on trying to get a simplified version of cities into TG. What I've done currently is tried the OSM conversion route. I've used OpenStreet Map to export an area (of Seattle) and than piped that into OSM2World, which will allow and OBJ export.

Haven't gotten to far into testing but you may want to give it a look. The only immediate concern I have is you'll have to export sections from OSM, accurate plotting your coordinates of each tile, and then bring them all through OSM2World, and weld the parts together.

Update: well it seems these would be good "maybe" for very distance cities. It seems some buildings are not correctly evaluated and you get floating floors/towers. Lol

[Dune]

That looks like a mess of inverted polys. Maybe try flipping them...

[Hannes]

That's indeed a great start! I'm always happy, when there are people who dare to animate. Don't be irritated, when there are not too many reactions or comments, since the animation section isn't visited as often as the image section for example. Unfortunately...

[WAS]

Don't be irritated, when there are not too many reactions or comments, since the animation section isn't visited as often as the image section for example. Unfortunately...

I'm guilty of this myself, but have been trying to check back and keep up to date.

[james adamson]

Hi all.
Quality not quantity
The fact that I have had such encouraging feedback from the three of you in particular who produce some of the most awesome work
as well as great creative/technical solutions is quite enough for me.
Much appreciated and I will move on to my next shot with a lot more confidence.
Cheers.
James.
p.s weird about the whole city coincidence.
With regards to my buildings, they come from an archmodels set that I have carefully retextured and done a fair bit of work on the materials in Modo. There a tons of texture layers for each building and correct me if I am wrong but it seems that shading of external materials is not TGS strong suit. It seems a very slow process to adjust and apply multiple materials to and object. I was hoping to drop in the objs as knockouts but render the full buildings beauty in Modo then use TGS depth and atmos layers in the comp with an environment map from TG. I tried bringing in a textured OBJ from modo and it looked ok but the textures were not as nice as when applied in Modo. My Modo scene file is a couple of GBS of just buildings so its pretty big.