importing Terragen

[Octagon]

Originally posted by Luis Cypher

[...]
I can do most of this by hand but matching the camera/image plane animation in maya is proving very difficult, being able to import the terragen cameras animation path would greatly simplify this for me.
[...]

Any help or ideas appreciated.

hi cypher,
i dont know a script that does that, but i would be very helpful :)

i'm a terragen lover myself but didnt find a way to bring the texture maps from terragen to maya. how did you do that? i only managed to export 1 channel tifs :(

about you camera problems: it's probably possible to do that kind of script but you would need to a) get the camera position/orientation ifrom terragen, which might be harder than it seems since camera animatino isnt built into terragen but is a plug-in in itself (right?) and b) you need to read that data you exported from terragen and read it in maya. so you'd end up with an exporter/importer workflow -> a lot of work!
have you tried 3d tracking your rendered terragen animations ? it shouldnt be to hard to place some good tracking markers in terragen to allow for an easier track.

hope this helps.
matthias

[Nicool]

Good idea Crys!

If you have some knowledges in Mathematics, you should be able to get the camera information from terragen to put it in the informations that can get a maya camera by a function... Sure:rolleyes:

Notice this function will use incremental system working on the terragen camera attirbutes varitation (as the motion is)...

Just the beginning of an analyse:wip:

[Luis Cypher]

Octogon said "i'm a terragen lover myself but didnt find a way to bring the texture maps from terragen to maya. how did you do that? "

By matching the exported objects position (rotation , scale) to the that of what you see on the image plane allows you to set the terrain objects material to "use background "
This supplies the texture maps. Essentially the imported object is just a stand-in object used as a place to stand your characters and provide shadows etc The imported terragen render provides the textures.

the only problem is you need to position your image plain behind all your geometry,then scale it accordingly.

This works ok for still scenes but animations arrg....my first attempt was to navigate my camera around using landmarks...didnt work too well, land becomes ocean,mountain becomes sky ....phoooey!!!

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