Dogfight curves

[gregsandor]

I'm animating a dogfight.  If you have working methods to simply animate ships along curved paths please post them. 

While I'm at it I'll make some notes.
Add ability to animate the vertical spacing of members of populations and to use a heightmap to distribute them within the space.

[Blonderator]

Nope, no curves. I'm animating a space fleet right now and it's extremely cumbersome. With such primitive animation tools, animating dozens of ships is very hard to do.

Planetside will improve the animation package after they release Terragen 2. That could be a while from now, they are taking their time. Which is good - I'd rather have a complete and bug free release that's late than a rushed product.

Then again they have gone past their release date several times now.

[gregsandor]

Tell me about your fleet animation:  I am about to smash two fleets into eachother, 57 capital ships on one side, 47 on the other, plus some hundreds of fighters and transports. 

[Blonderator]

Hah are you joking? Wow, you might want to wait for an update to the animation package.

That's going to be tough


And also, there's no way to do missles/explosions (since there's no particle effects in Terragen.)

[gregsandor]

There is never "no way" to do anything.  Some of the effects we can do in post, but there are plenty of options just as TG is today. 
What kind of battle are you making?

[old_blaggard]

When I was working on an animation a while back, I exported the terrain segment to .ter, pushed it into TerrAnim, created a TG 0.9 camera path there, and then wrote a quick and dirty PHP script to convert it to TG2's animation scripts, which resulted in 1550 perfectly smooth frames.  The format for animating objects is similar to that of the camera, so if you have half-decent scripting skills, you can probably do a similar thing with your fighters.

[gregsandor]

Thanks, I'll try that.

[Blonderator]

There is never "no way" to do anything.  Some of the effects we can do in post, but there are plenty of options just as TG is today. 
What kind of battle are you making?

I mean you can't do anything extensive, particle-effects wise. Which is fine; that's not what Terragen was meant for.

I mean like full digital effects, IE explosions, smoke trails, missiles, fire, etc. This is more for a program like Lightwave 3D.

[old_blaggard]

I mean like full digital effects, IE explosions, smoke trails, missiles, fire, etc. This is more for a program like Lightwave 3D.

Craaaaazy clouds masks.... .

[gregsandor]

I mean like full digital effects, IE explosions, smoke trails, missiles, fire, etc. This is more for a program like Lightwave 3D.

Craaaaazy clouds masks.... .

Yep.

Can you describe how to translate motion into TG please?  I'd prefer to use Anim8or to set it up. 

[old_blaggard]

Ugh... I'm not familiar with this format.  It looks like this is more of a formula, though; my conversion script technique requires each frame to be spelled out (unless you want to trust TG2's interpolation engine or write a bezier function yourself).  BigBen did some work on this over a year ago; you might find some useful information on dealing with .chan files by browsing this topic (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1422.0) or by searching the forums for discussions on the format of chan files.

[Arandil]

If I was doing this, I'd animate the cameras and objects in Max, then import the animations into TG2 using the emecstudios plugin here:

http://www.emecstudios.be/index.php/plugins/planetside-software-terragen-2.html

But if you don't have Max, this won't help you.   

[gregsandor]

This really must be added to Terragen:  all we need are handles on our path points so we can move them.

[Oshyan]

These kinds of enhancements to animation functions will be a part of the finished Animation Module, to be completed after TG2's "gold" release.

- Oshyan

[gregsandor]

We have to come up with solutions for this kind of thing now.  I'm animating today, not in some hazy future time.