text script file for animation

[tdunham]

Does TG2 provide a utility that allows the user to create an external script file that can be used to control camera positioning for animations.  The old Terragen had some tools for this but I haven't heard anything about this for the new version.

[Oshyan]

TG2's animation is all built-in. You can animate cameras, and virtually any other setting of any node. However you do need to purchase the Deep + Animation version of TG2 to use animation functions. Once you have Deep + Animation, animating is simple. There is a button with an s-curve with an A on the right, next to most node settings. Clicking this with the Deep + Animation version will bring up options for creating and deleting keyframes. The timeline at the bottom of TG2 allows to set the current frame and scrub through an already setup animation.

- Oshyan

[tdunham]

Thanks for your reply.  It sounds like building animations for scenes in TG2 will be robust.  I was also wondering if the settings for a TG2 animation could be saved to a script file that could be used in another animation program, such as LightWave, so to match up camera position and angles for compositing work.

[jo]

Hi,

TG2 can read chan files for camera matching etc. There has been a lot of work done by people setting up and animating cameras in other apps and generating chan files to sync TG2. If you search for chan or .chan on the forums you should turn up a lot of stuff.

Regards,

Jo

[4Runner]

Can it read chan file without animation module or cant? Can i simply write x,y,z coordinates to chan file or it have some rules?

[Oshyan]

It requires the animation module to read multiple frames of data. Without the animation module it will only load one frame worth of data. It does need to be in the actual CHAN data format as well, though I'm not sure of the details of that. You should be able to find a specification out there on the web somewhere.

- Oshyan

[neuspadrin]

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1409.msg14025#msg14025

matt explaining how tg detects and imports the formats.