Export Terragen terrains and all displacements and color details to Arnold?

Started by vinyvince, July 21, 2018, 03:18:03 PM

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vinyvince

If i creat my landscape in World Creator 2 or other software, import it to Terragen and do fine details displacement adjustement like strata and so do better structure the rock, is there a good reliable option after to export my terrain and final displacement to Arnold and Maya? 

Your Experience with Terragen and helps will be greatly appreciated, thanks!


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________________________________________________________________

Vincent Thomas   (VFX and Art since 1998)
Senior Concept and Env DigiMatte Artist all in one  with a deep background in Lighting Lookdev  And Creative Supervisor VFX supervisor
http://fr.linkedin.com/in/vincentthomas

WAS

I believe geometry exporting via the micro exporter is reserved for professional copies of the software. You can also save heightfields, but doesn't come with some of the bells and whistles most need.

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Micro_Exporter

Oshyan

The Micro Exporter is good for geometry+UV but does not export color/texture at this time.

Heightfield export works for planar-only data (i.e. no overhangs).

Here is a vector displacement export tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTKfAeEPDhY

- Oshyan

digitalguru

Thanks for referencing my tutorial Oyshan!

vinyvince:

Quoteis there a good reliable option after to export my terrain and final displacement to Arnold and Maya? 

Yes there is  :-) - check out my tutorial for my Maya Mel script:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbWYn_YHMI&t=2s

Should be exactly what you need, though as WASasquatch mentions you will need the Professional version for this to work.

Quotef I create my landscape in World Creator 2 or other software, import it to Terragen and do fine details displacement adjustment like strata and so do better structure the rock,

That's my workflow, though I've been using World Machine to generate my heightfields.

The workflow using this script can export terrain from Terragen either using the Micro exporter or as vector displacement maps. Terrain can be easily tiled to up to 64 tiles to make the management of large data sets manageable.

Color textures can be tiled and exported in the same way, and the script also manages the textures for Arnold in Maya.

I do have to say though, that while it's possible to get all this data into Maya, it's much better handled in Terragen. Terragen uses micro-polygon rendering and render-time displacement to be able to create vast detailed terrain with minimal memory overhead. To get this data into Maya requires much more memory - some of my experiments pushed 50gb loading multiple tiles of micro poly terrain.

It is possible though, have a go and let me know what you think.

Link to script:

https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/terraman-for-maya

p.s love your reel!


falcooat

Quick question. Can you tell me what causes the triangulation in the image below, and is there any way to avoid this?
[attachimg=1]

WAS

Quote from: falcooat on October 03, 2018, 11:59:30 AM
Quick question. Can you tell me what causes the triangulation in the image below, and is there any way to avoid this?
[attachimg=1]

Looks like low MPD detail in combination with low geometric detail.

falcooat

Thanks for the quick response. The MPD is set at 1, so should be pretty decent? would setting smooth surface on the "Compute Terrain" node make any difference?

digitalguru

Is this an Arnold render of a Micro exporter output from Terragen?

WAS

Quote from: falcooat on October 03, 2018, 02:54:21 PM
Thanks for the quick response. The MPD is set at 1, so should be pretty decent? would setting smooth surface on the "Compute Terrain" node make any difference?

Smoothing Surface may produce looks like this as it will smooth finer detail in the geometry, evening fine geometry out. Are you using a heightfield?

I am not familiar with the Micro Exporter as it's a Professional feature and I work off the freeware version, however, according to the Wiki the Micro Exporter can export in TGO, FBX, OBJ and LWO2, so I'd imagine Maya and Arnold can handle OBJ/FBX.

Oshyan

My guess is you are using the new Path Tracing render method. This currently renders terrain with the MPD limited (actually multiplied) by the "ray detail multiplier" in the Subdiv Settings of the render node. In the default setup it is 0.25 or 1/4 of the actual main MPD setting. Set it to 1 and set MPD back to 0.5 or 0.65 or so and you'll get better results (with longer render time).

- Oshyan

Matt

I assume this is the Arnold render. If you export the geometry from an overhead view, the size of the triangles will be fairly uniform in world space, but of course when you view this in perspective you'll have less apparent detail in the foreground than in the background. One way to tackle this would be to do the micropoly export from a perspective render that is similar to the view you will render in Arnold. But that might be impractical. You can try increasing the micropoly detail when you export, but that could result in some enormous files. You probably need to smooth the surface in Maya (or whatever 3D program you're using Arnold in), but it's still going to lack detail in the foreground.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Tangled-Universe

What if one disables "fully adaptive" in the subdiv settings, would that make the micropolygons more uniformly sized?

Matt

That is not the problem. They're already uniform enough in world space.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Oshyan

Oh, it appears I misunderstood - that's an Arnold render? Riiight. :D

- Oshyan

ajcgi

If you're exporting terrain that is mostly displaced in Y only, then just use the heightfield method.
Make it large, like 8k large or higher.
A method that doesn't use the built in heightfield nodes... [do try Terraman too btw]

If you get a Get Altitude node, plug that into the luminosity of a default shader and put that on your landscape, with your last displacement node going into Child, with diffuse, reflection etc all at zero, render it top down with an orthographic camera, then that results in a black and white altitude map which when loaded as a push map in your 3D software should result in correct altitudes, providing you make your grid the same width as the orthographic width of your camera. Don't have lights on and set the ortho camera to have exposure 1.

It might seem like legwork but it works perfectly every time and avoids all this terrain export, triangulated stuff which doesn't guarantee nice shading in your renderer. Then also you can project your colour texture the same way, rendered from the same camera. Things will line up nicely.