A pair of months ago I thought about a project utilizing TG2 to represent the notorius Mars rover in action.
I started it in my spare time just for fun... and quickly turned out into a real obsession. What came out is a more-than-a-month work with a pretty complicated workflow to realize the final image.
The first thing to do was building the rover, done with AutoCAD. Even if pretty resemblant it's not intended to be exactly fit to reality - I modeled it almost exclusively "by eye" watching photographs, images taken by the rovers, the wonderful works of Dan Maas and little technical data collected over the internet. It was a real pain in the ass, but I also had a lot of fun working on it and discovered a lot of interesting things. Here's the first version, before additional modeling done in MAX
The original intention was to import an .OBJ version into TG2 doing a straight render but the model continued to grow and grow up - too big, too many materials and complex shaders to work out. So I decided to split the workflow and utilize Mental Ray to render the rover then TG2 to complete the environment using LWO exporter and the EmecStudios plugin (very useful) to perfectly match cameras and lightsources.
So I set up the model materials with Mental Ray and simultaneously started working on a decent environment on TG2 where to place the finished rover. To get a perfect integration between the two render engines I recurred to image-based lighting and realized an HDR vertical cross of the finished .tgd with six separate images rendered in TG2 (then converted in a lat/long map with HDRShop) to use with MR indirect illumination and environment reflection (here's an 8 bit depht reduced version):
The next step was creating an .LWO portion of the selected area to use as matte terrain in MAX to place the scaled rover, and to import a reduced poly .OBJ version in TG2 to create the wheel traces. I used an orthoprojection camera to render a terrain reference for Photoshop and paint the traces. The resulting texture was used as a displacement function in TG2
Here comes the final render, with the two images rendered in TG2 and MAX then linked together in PS
The rover shadow is rendered with Mental Ray over the matte terrain, then imported as an additional layer. All the image editing work has been done on .EXR format to get best control over tonal range.
This is not a final version, and I'm still not very satisfied with it but I decided to freeze the work until I'll have my hardware renewed - working with this project on a single core P4 was very painful. Maybe I'll post some other version with different balancing but the plan is to produce a serie of images in different environments and atmospheric conditions.
These are the main steps I followed to work things out, but if I should say all the things I've done over this project I could fill a little book on it
.
Even if it's not entirely TG2 I thought it would be fine to post it here and share my work with you, because Terragen has a fundamental part on it. Plus, it could be a good example on how to integrate our beloved scenery-generator software in articulated pipelines.
Regards,
Lucio
