procedurally generated terrain export in TG2?? Did I miss something?

[rodpacker1]

I just went through the new TG2 webpage once more and stumbled across this:

"Terragen 2 blurs the distinction between geometry and displacement that is common in most high end production renderers, making it an ideal solution for highly complex natural objects such as terrain. While the emphasis is on rendering procedural surfaces with extremely high detail, image-based textures and imported geometry are also supported, and the resulting surfaces can be exported at various resolutions in popular 3D object formats. Billions of polygons can be rendered through the use of instancing. Import objects and certain types of built-in objects can be instanced using the population tools"


Is there a way of exporting e.g. highres obj's of the procedural generated terrains other then the micropoly-exporter now?!?!

Would be awesome for adding FX in other tools!!!

cheers
Rodpacker

[Hetzen]

You can use the "LWO Micro Exporter". You have to attach it to a camera for it to export the geometry seen through that view, be it top down or what ever. You then use the Render animation Tab in the Render dialogue, setting the animation length to 1 frame, and pick the LWO Micro Exporter from your scene. Be carefull on your quality settings, the higher the the value, the larger the amount of triangles exported, to the point of nothing outside TG being able to open it!

With carefull settings it can be done and imported into other apps to be used as reference geometry, shadow mattes and masks.

[Tangled-Universe]

You can use the "LWO Micro Exporter". You have to attach it to a camera for it to export the geometry seen through that view, be it top down or what ever. You then use the Render animation Tab in the Render dialogue, setting the animation length to 1 frame, and pick the LWO Micro Exporter from your scene. Be carefull on your quality settings, the higher the the value, the larger the amount of triangles exported, to the point of nothing outside TG being able to open it!

With carefull settings it can be done and imported into other apps to be used as reference geometry, shadow mattes and masks.

Indeed, and to add to this, generally a detailvalue of ~0.5 is sufficient for many purposes. Above this detailvalue the mesh gets too detailed and too big to handle (probably).

Martin

[Mohawk20]

Above this detailvalue the mesh gets too detailed and too big to handle (probably).

Martin

Very true!
I had to scale down detail drastically to do a decent export of a piece of my Hanging valley terrain. The file was still huge at 0.4 detail.

[rodpacker1]

Thanks guys for the replies.


However I guess I named it wrong - sorry my bad.  But yeah with "micropoly-exporter" I did mean the LWO-Micro-Exporter

Unfortunately it doesn't give me the backfaces which I would need.
However I guess I could do 4 shots to get each side and fuse those geometries togetha in Maya or Houdini

Anyways I was hoing there was a "I'll do it for ya"-button in the latest version of TG2 I hadn't heard of yet

cheers
Rodpacker

[cyphyr]

Not really sure what your trying to do here but when needing to export a terrain for use in nother app I place a camera above my point of interest and render that in orthographic projection (set in the camera properties), then I hook up a "lwo micro exporter" node to the render>sequance output tab. Set up your detail level (not too high) and you should be done. You have to set a file location and set a name with .lwo extension in the "lwo micro exporter" node.
Should work
richard

[Oshyan]

The Heightfield Export LWO node seems to be overlooked a lot, but if what you need is *non*-camera dependent geometry, then this is the best way to go. Your terrain isn't in a heightfield format? Never fear, just feed your procedural terrain shader network into a Heightfield Generate shader input, set the area and resolution (this will determine coverage area and detail, hence geometry density, respectively), and then press the Generate button. Then attach your Heightfield Export LWO to the Heightfield Generate, and you're set. The only limitation is if your terrain has overhangs, this won't capture them of course.

- Oshyan

[Cyber-Angel]

Here is an Idea (For the long term future Post 64Bit Conversion etc): would it be possible (With considerable development and testing) be possible to have Terragen convert the procedural landscape into a 3D Mesh (Quads not Triangles, please) and then export that at the required resolution? This would solve IMHO many problems of trying to export terrain for integration into other 3D software! 

Regards to you.   

Cyber-Angel   

[Oshyan]

At the risk of making it sound like a promise of a future function (which of course I can't make), I don't think that would be tremendously difficult to implement. It will probably be a part of the improved import/export functions we'll be working on in the future.

- Oshyan

[domdib]

It turns out there is another way of exporting terrains - just needs a conversion step. See this message:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6305.msg67013#msg67013