Competent Terragen User required!

Charlie · October 13, 2008, 03:11:36 PM

Hi,

A competent Terragen user is required to create some 3D fly-throughs for a documentary. A highly ambitious individual is required who can work with all environments, mountain, jungle, desert, etc. Terrain needs to be created from Google Earth and relief map data. User is required on a freelance basis starting tomorrow as project needs to be done in a week.

If you can work quickly then please send your details with examples of your work to me, Charlie at Underdog. If you have a rate card send that too. Preference will be given to people who can visit our studio which is in Tott Ct Road, London.

Thanks

buzzzzz1 · October 13, 2008, 03:14:27 PM

A Week? I got to see this!

cyphyr · October 13, 2008, 05:36:32 PM

Hmm now let me see, if its for a documentary then the resolution will need to be pretty high (1280x720 I think) and the detail, AA and sample quality set pretty high too. I'm just guessing here but if your mentioning several (three or more) environments and if camera is close enough to the ground to see individual trees I'd guess your looking at (and I'm really being hopeful here) at maybe, just maybe at rendering two frames a day on a decent dual core workstation (make that three 'n a bit frames on a quad core then). Talk to your render farm manager and do the math on that one. If all your doing is draping satellite imagery over geo-referenced elevation data then you could save considerable time on rendering but you'd still have to add in any clouds and tree populations. All in all a week is next to impossible for creating a finished quality animation. Given all of the above you could maybe create the scenes in a week if you had a team to work on all the content but it even then it would be really be pushing it.

All that said I don't think there's another app that could do as good a job as far as realism and "jaw dropping in your face-ism" and I do expect to see Terragen used in just this way soon.

If your NDA will allow could you give some more details, maybe others here could give a more accurate sense of what could be achieved with such a short deadline.

Good luck with your project.

Richard

PG · October 13, 2008, 06:36:18 PM

Just to add on cyphers comments. Why did you leave yourself a week for this? Landscape rendering is the most resource intensive of all, and even if you used 800x600 resolutions you'd be looking at maybe 10 a day. Unless you're making a 30 second cartoon I think you need to budget a little more time.
Also, what's your studio name? I know Tottenham court road pretty well and could pop up at some point this week.

Mohawk20 · October 13, 2008, 06:44:41 PM

Just as an example, in the last week I have done 3 animations of 150 frames each... that's 450 frames a week.
The catch is that those were all from planetary POV, and those really fly.

I've been trying to get a forrest looking right for the last 3 days, not to mention any cam path editing. Each frame takes 8 hours to render at great quality at 720x480. That means for a couple of minutes of footage, and more than one anim, you need at least one month, with a dual core system. I can do three cores over 2 pc's, but that would still be WAY to slow.

I fear you'd have to check on a Vue forum this time, although they could give you the same time frame for their workflow...

sonshine777 · October 15, 2008, 12:53:32 AM

1. There is a weeks worth of resource gathering before you even get to putting the scenes mentioned together.
2. As mentioned earlier setting up the camera path for each scene alone could take a week.
3. At 30 frames a second you would need 450 frames for 15 seconds of video that's another week. (And it sounds like this needs to be more than 15 seconds in length.)

If you took this request to anyone with "skill" in any popular animation software you may get a time frame of three weeks and that would be pushing it.

Cyber-Angel · October 15, 2008, 01:08:07 AM

I have some concerns as well.

1. You do not say what the nature of the documentary is as regards to subject or needed animation running time.

2. You do not mention resolution or frame rate required for the animation.

3. You do not mention the intended broadcast market for this documentary weather you looking for NTSC, PAL or SECAM

4. You do not Mention specializations of delivery such as file format/s, EPS or SEMPTE Color Bars etc.

A week seems like short notice as others have stated, but you post is lite on the technical aspects your looking for.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel

PG · October 15, 2008, 04:25:31 AM

And you've only got 5 days left mate

You're email address is even incomplete. is it .com, .co.uk, .co.fsfszx? If you can extend the deadline then I'm sure you'll find the support you require. You should also budget the cost of getting heightfields as you'd want DEM's which can cost quite a bit for accurate ones. And I'm not even sure you can get heightfields from google maps. Not without getting the objects (trees, buildings, etc) forged into the shape of the terrain.

chefc · October 15, 2008, 11:15:50 AM

Quote from: PG on October 15, 2008, 04:25:31 AM
And you've only got 5 days left mate You're email address is even incomplete. is it .com, .co.uk, .co.fsfszx? If you can extend the deadline then I'm sure you'll find the support you require. You should also budget the cost of getting heightfields as you'd want DEM's which can cost quite a bit for accurate ones. And I'm not even sure you can get heightfields from google maps. Not without getting the objects (trees, buildings, etc) forged into the shape of the terrain.

Way out of my league

but Charlie does seem to be located in London and his site carries some big names
http://www.underdog.tv/
Good luck to whoever answers the call

PG · October 15, 2008, 11:25:28 AM

I like the Ford Verve advert. Do you use Video Toaster, charlie?

rcallicotte · October 15, 2008, 11:32:02 AM

I'd be wary of biting this off. With the present TG2, this timeline can't be met with a quality result.

plugsnpixels · October 16, 2008, 02:58:43 AM

This sounds familiar; didn't somebody else try this same type of recruitment awhile back?

At the very least this shows really poor planning (need to start the very day after he first posts, be done in a week??).

Mohawk20 · October 16, 2008, 03:37:39 AM

Just so we're clear, Charlie: this doesn't mean we don't want to do it!

If you give us more time, we'll be glad to do it!

PG · October 16, 2008, 06:19:17 AM

Indeed, and if you can budget for it then you could most certainly recruit a couple of us to do various areas, being that we all have our individual strengths.

rcallicotte · October 16, 2008, 09:06:44 AM

Mohawk20 and PG - good points.