Quote from: fREeCYCLE on February 13, 2007, 11:24:00 AM
...If we can dump the animated channel data from TG into a generic text format, then why wouldn't a (reasonably) simple php/mysql solution work for redistributing the divided data? I mean, the process seems limited to 'inhale, divy, format, exhale'.
A number of reasons
Potential placement of sun control:
Set planet, latitude/longitude, start date and time, end date and time... calculate position of sun for each frame
http://www.astro.uu.nl/~strous/AA/en/reken/zonpositie.htmlControl of Surface shaders:
Change colours, coverage constraints... any numeric value
Cloud tweaks:
Changing weather, wind speed/direction etc...
Population control:
Rather than populate an entire planet with objects, restrict the distribution of objects to an area around the camera, moving each population with the camera. If surfaces are used to simulate objects on distant terrain then these need to be masked out of the population distribution and these masks must also be moved with the camera. The more I learn about TG2 the more ideas I get for how things can be done.
Tides:
e.g. Sinusoidal variation of water level
Interpolation methods and data conversion:
The method for calculating intermediate values between key frames can be completely customised to the type of data and the relationship between the way the data changes and the final render. Other data may be imported from other sources and may need converting to a form suitable for use in TG.
Integrating with other programs:
e.g. I use Panotools to use different lens projections, allowing extreme wide angle lenses to be used e.g. fisheye. This requires rendering multiple images per frame, stitching and then extracting the correct view from the stitched image (and cleaning up the temporary files). Using a commandline renderer this can be automated on a per frame basis. And so on.
Here's an old project I did in TG0.9 using TerraTweak to create separate files for each frame.
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/terragen/terratweak/The hardest part of this project was controlling the lighting transition for the sunrise/set. When I consider how much more is possible in TG2 and how accessible the variables are compared to TG0.9 it gets hard to keep a reign on the ideas
Quote from: hyper1 on February 13, 2007, 12:59:31 PM
I've almost come to the conclusion that it would be easier to take a baked file, from your program of choice, make the necessary corrections for x,y,z and h,p,b and simply paste those coordinates into the .tgd file. If you solve this riddle let us know.
Thanks for the link. Looking at that and my answer above I think I'll probably end up on the per-frame TGD route. I've already done a proof of concept database (key frames sample image below of a converted Terranim script and increasing cloud cover). The database was pretty crude and I'm adding a TGD parser to make things a lot simpler (and make it possible to add some data validation to prevent stupid errors)