Changing to 2.0 for .9 adjustments

[Flapman]

Hiya,

I was wondering.   I have always used .9 and like the ease of point and click on the camera placement, the terrain editor window, slope and start and end elevation sliders and a lot of the WYSIWG features of .9.  Most of those don't exist in 2.0.  Is that deliberate?   It seems that a lot of the support is going toward Terragen2 so I better get used to it.    Can someone help me transition better.

Thx in advance,

Flap

[jo]

Hi Flap,

We acknowledge that TG2 isn't as easy to use as TG v0.9. Initially this particular incarnation of TG2 was intended more for higher end users, but we should have made things a bit simpler from the start. Hindsight is 20/20. We do want to improve this in the future.

There are some big differences between TG v0.9 and TG2. v0.9 uses a heightfield of a fixed size which makes a lot of things easy. TG2 is based on a whole planet and it also has powerful displacement capabilities which make things a lot of things more difficult.

An example of this is the start and and elevation sliders. That's easy to do in v0.9 because we know the lowest and highest points in the terrain. In TG2 we're dealing with a much larger area and the displacement capabilities also make it much harder to figure out the lowest and highest points of the terrain.

You have a good point about the slope. At the moment TG2's system for making the settings windows doesn't allow for graphical previews. It should have already, but it doesn't. After the final release this is one of the things we'll be working on, so we'll be able to put graphical previews in settings windows and add back some of those things like slope previews.

There are a couple of ways which let you do some of the same things as in v0.9. For positioning the camera you can use one of the other 3D Preview views to click on the camera object and reposition it. The other views are accessible from the second button from the left under the 3D Preview. Click it to change to a top down view for example, which is like the old previews in v0.9. You may need to zoom out until you can see the camera object. You can't currently rotate the camera though, just shift it's position.

TG2 does have some navigation controls which might make things easier for you. These move the camera in the 3D Previews. There is information about the navigation controls here.

You can find the slope and elevation of a point in the terrain by mousing over it in the 3D Preview. The information about the object under the mouse is shown at the bottom of the 3D Preview and you can also open the 3D Preview Location window from the View menu. Lets say you want to set the maximum elevation of a shader. Find a point on the terrain which is as high as you want the shader to go. Move the mouse over it and note the Y coordinate in the text under the 3D Preview. Put this value in the maximum elevation setting for the shader.

Regards,

Jo

[Flapman]

Thanks jo,

I appreciate your help.  I do like the power of 2.0 but really enjoy the simplicity of .9.  A lot of that comes from using Terragen to concept terrain for Virtual Worlds Projects then trying to export the finals into something that can be used to render a Terrain Object/Model.

What would be neat is to be able to have a plug-in that exports a specific area of the Terrain Map in T2 into a Terrain Object.  Now that is forward thinking.    This would allow game and virtual world designers to use a licensed version of T2 to produce whole world landscapes and pick and choose parts for reproduction and use.   What do you think jo?

I look forward to seeing what is coming down the pike. 

Flap

Hi Flap,

We acknowledge that TG2 isn't as easy to use as TG v0.9. Initially this particular incarnation of TG2 was intended more for higher end users, but we should have made things a bit simpler from the start. Hindsight is 20/20. We do want to improve this in the future.

There are some big differences between TG v0.9 and TG2. v0.9 uses a heightfield of a fixed size which makes a lot of things easy. TG2 is based on a whole planet and it also has powerful displacement capabilities which make things a lot of things more difficult.

An example of this is the start and and elevation sliders. That's easy to do in v0.9 because we know the lowest and highest points in the terrain. In TG2 we're dealing with a much larger area and the displacement capabilities also make it much harder to figure out the lowest and highest points of the terrain.

You have a good point about the slope. At the moment TG2's system for making the settings windows doesn't allow for graphical previews. It should have already, but it doesn't. After the final release this is one of the things we'll be working on, so we'll be able to put graphical previews in settings windows and add back some of those things like slope previews.

There are a couple of ways which let you do some of the same things as in v0.9. For positioning the camera you can use one of the other 3D Preview views to click on the camera object and reposition it. The other views are accessible from the second button from the left under the 3D Preview. Click it to change to a top down view for example, which is like the old previews in v0.9. You may need to zoom out until you can see the camera object. You can't currently rotate the camera though, just shift it's position.

TG2 does have some navigation controls which might make things easier for you. These move the camera in the 3D Previews. There is information about the navigation controls here.

You can find the slope and elevation of a point in the terrain by mousing over it in the 3D Preview. The information about the object under the mouse is shown at the bottom of the 3D Preview and you can also open the 3D Preview Location window from the View menu. Lets say you want to set the maximum elevation of a shader. Find a point on the terrain which is as high as you want the shader to go. Move the mouse over it and note the Y coordinate in the text under the 3D Preview. Put this value in the maximum elevation setting for the shader.

Regards,

Jo

[gregsandor]

What would be neat is to be able to have a plug-in that exports a specific area of the Terrain Map in T2 into a Terrain Object.  Now that is forward thinking.    This would allow game and virtual world designers to use a licensed version of T2 to produce whole world landscapes and pick and choose parts for reproduction and use.   What do you think jo?

We can already do this in TG2.

[Flapman]

How Greg?

Flap

What would be neat is to be able to have a plug-in that exports a specific area of the Terrain Map in T2 into a Terrain Object.  Now that is forward thinking.    This would allow game and virtual world designers to use a licensed version of T2 to produce whole world landscapes and pick and choose parts for reproduction and use.   What do you think jo?

We can already do this in TG2.

[old_blaggard]

Use the "Heightfield Generate" node and plug the terrain into the "Shader input." Then select the area that you want to be exported, generate the heightfield, and then right click the node and select "Save file as..." and you're done!

[Flapman]

Interesting.  Now how do you select the terrain area you want?

Use the "Heightfield Generate" node and plug the terrain into the "Shader input." Then select the area that you want to be exported, generate the heightfield, and then right click the node and select "Save file as..." and you're done!

[gregsandor]

In the generator node that you add you specify the size of terrain that you want, e.g. 513 513, and its coverage in meters, say 2565 m x. 

[Flapman]

Way cool.  I am going to have to experiment with that.

Thx.

In the generator node that you add you specify the size of terrain that you want, e.g. 513 513, and its coverage in meters, say 2565 m x.