Creating Animations in Terragen

This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with the basic operation of Terragen.

Since the most recent versions, Animation has been readily available in Terragen. This tutorial guides you through the processes of using Daniel Parnham's Terranim, Matt Fairclough's Scripter (provided with Terragen), and also my new program Targeter. It also contains some information on editing or creating scripts by hand.

Terranim, Targeter and Script Browser are in no way connected to Terragen, and are not 'official' Terragen products.

Using Script Files

Once you have created a script file by one of the methods described below, you will need to use it! You should set up all settings like normal - lighting, atmosphere, detail, surface maps, etc. and only then execute the script. To execute the script select Terragen->Execute Script.

terranim - scripter - targeter - and finally...

Terranim

Terranim can be downloaded free of charge from http://parnham.future.easyspace.com/. Terranim is ©1999 Daniel Parnham.

Image: TerranimTerranim is simplicity itself to use. To start with, create a terrain as normal, but choose it wisely with an eye for an animation - it is all to easy to end up looking off the edge of the world! The ideal landscape for a Terranim animation is one which is surrounded on all sides by hills.

Once you have created your terrain, save it. Then load Terranim, click on the "import Terrain" button and select the terrain you just saved.

Creating a path in Terranim is simply a case of clicking on the map on points that you want the camera to go through. Terranim will then calculate a curved path that goes through all those points.

Image: Terranim gives a curved path between the defined pointsYou have to be careful not to put the points too close to each other, or very sudden camera movements may occur. Likewise, you should try not to make extreme changes in direction - this would look false.

Terranim makes it's best effort to make sure that the camera stays above the land, but it is best to check this manually. After you have worked out your camera's path, click on "View Height Graph". This displays a red line representing the terrain, and a black line representing the camera's path.

(1)
(2)
Here (1) the camera is going below the landscape, so we can click on the point on the left here, and hold down the up-arrow key until the path of the camera is above the landscape (2).

In fact, in this particular case it may have been better to put another point on top of the hill.

Once you are happy with the path of the camera, you can animate the clouds. By clicking on the white box you can set a wind bearing and strength (the longer the line, the faster the clouds will move). To enable this, you must tick the "Enable Cloud Scrolling" box.

Next, make sure that the animation is going to last as long as you want it to. Click on the "Calculate Frames" button and the number of frames that the animation would take is displayed in the text box next to the button. You can alter this by increasing and reducing the Frames/s control - they are directly related to each other.

The very last thing to do before saving is to set the name and path of the picture files. The pictures generated by Terragen will be the same as in the textbox with a four-digit number added to it (e.g. if the name and path is set to c:\anim, the pictures will be c:\anim0001.bmp, c:\anim0002.bmp etc.)

terranim - scripter - targeter - and finally...

Scripter

Scripter comes free with Terragen. It can be found in the same directory as you installed Terragen. It is ©1999 Matt Fairclough.

Scripter is an astonishly simple yet powerful program. It is more for those who really know what they are doing than for those who want to create an animation quickly and easily. Scripter does not control the Target, so you have to put that in by hand, or Terragen will use the Target as set in Terragen before the script is executed.

You will have to calculate by hand the camera's start and end position (the best way is to click on the Terrain View in Terragen, and copy down the values you see on the Rendering Control. However, Camera positioning is entirely optional - you could instead (or as well as) move the sun's position.

Whatever you are controlling in Scripter-generated scripts, the script generated is a smooth movement between the start and end positions.

Before creating the script, make sure you set the initial and final frame numbers correctly, and also the filenames for the images and the script file. An error will occur if the directories do not exist. After creating the script, you can click on "Notepad It" to edit the script before execution.

terranim - scripter - targeter - and finally...

Targeter

Targeter is available for download free of charge from http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jgcm100/vis/targeter.html. Targeter is ©1999 John McLusky.

This could also be known as a shameless plug section seeing as I wrote Targeter, but I think it's worth describing properly here. Using Targeter you can create an animation that, as well as having a moving Camera, can also have a moving Target. To create this moving target you can use Terranim or Scripter as usual.

Firstly, create a script describing the movement of the camera as normal, and save it. Then create a script which describes the target - however, you should set the camera data, as it is the camera data from the second script that is used for the target data for the combined script.

camera path target path both, overlaid

It is hard to describe eloquently what would happen here - the camera would start at the yellow point at the bottom, looking towards the yellow point at the right. as the camera moves up towards the top right, the target moves left, so that eventually the camera is moving backwards relative to it's point of view. Like I say, it can be very confusing describing this so I suggest you download Script Browser which lets you preview the results of a script before you execute it.

Some programs may well insert Camera Heading, Pitch and Banking data into their scripts, and more often than not this will look utterly wrong when used in a combined script. Therefore you can tell Targeter not to include any such data in the resulting script.

terranim - scripter - targeter - and finally...

And Finally...

Once you've rendered your animation, you're left with a series of .bmp files - you really want to convert them to a proper animation file. There are several freeware/shareware animation tools around. My personal favourite is Bink!, a new tool which creates better quality and yet smaller animations in the new "bik" format. There is a small guide on creating Bink files here.

Before you do that, though, you can use Daniel Parnham's program Bitty to antialias your images or add motion blur. If you do want to antialias your images, you should render them larger than you want them to be in the animation. If you want to add motion blur, you should use more frames than you would otherwise need.

I've written a little program called Script Browser, which allows you to preview the path of the camera and target before you run a script. Quite simply, you load in a script, click "go" and it will run through the script from above, showing the relative movement of the Terrain. This is most useful for combined scripts created with Targeter, because sometimes the results are not so obvious until you actually start rendering.



render controls

landscape

water

clouds

atmosphere

lighting

image
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©May, 1999 John McLusky