You can however, load an OBJ and then copy/paste motion from an imported null to the OBJ.įor the terrain, I played around with various techniques including using a particle emitter and instancing the low resolution mountain geometry. I also replaced all the animated geometry with null objects, because Terragen currently does not import geometry via its FBX importer. This is because I wanted to be able to reposition the aircraft and camera's altitude in Terragen, and with everything set to zero it's much easier. When done with all the animation and right before I baked out all the animated items, I reset the master null's "Y" axis position to zero. For example, when the camera pans around the middle aircraft, I used the opportunity to reposition the other two aircraft while they were off screen.Īt the end of the shot, when the three aircraft break off and into the distance, I used the Relativity plugin to help maintain a graceful arc to their forward motion. Even traveling at a constant speed required some adjustments to the aircraft's positions based on the camera's field of view. I used Noisy Channel and Noisy Channel 2 to apply a slight banking rotations, but in the end these were dialed way back. This approach allowed each of the aircraft to have their own motions as well. In other words, the aircraft approach the camera and then fly past past, but how do you animate that? Do you animate the aircraft, the camera, or both? Can you imagine trying to do that if they were not parented but actually moving at 680 meters per second? It would not only be difficult to set that up initially, but what if you needed to make changes based on a director's comments later on? The main reason for parenting the aircraft and camera to the null, is that you want to establish the visual relationship between them. The altitude of the camera and aircraft above the ground plane can be adjusted by changing the null object's "Y" axis value. In the shot we're traveling at mach two, which is approximately 680 meters per second, so you just divide 680 meters by 24 frames to get the value you need for frame 24. To increase or decrease the speed at which everything is traveling, I only need to adjust the keyframe value on frame 24. Usually I prefer to make a keyframe on frame zero and another at frame 24, based on the scene's frames per second, and then set the keyframe's pre-behavior and post-behavior settings to "linear" in the graph editor. It had two keyframes which determined the speed at which everything traveled in the shot. Using a low res model doesn't slow your computer system down, and at this point in the project you want to be able to make changes quickly.Ī null object was used as a parent object for the three aircraft and the camera. Terragen and Lighwave "units" are both based on meters, so if you use real world scales the two software packages work seamlessly together. The important thing here was that the model was built in real world scale. So here are some of the step by step things I went through in Lightwave.Īt the beginning, we were undecided about the type of aircraft to be used, so I modeled a proxy aircraft based on a SU27 fighter. As with any shot, in retrospect I would do it completely different if I had to do over, but that just goes to show you never stop learning. That's because it's easy to add additional cameras, apply motion modifiers like Noisy Channel, or load from scene, etc. I've been using Lightwave since the mid 1990's, so it has become second nature for me to use it to setup and previs a shot. Thanks for your interest in the "Terragen for VFX" series and comments, and I'm happy to answer any questions here about how we used Lightwave in this production. I think Kevin Kipper is making the tutorials. Especially new users use unneeded high settings.Īnyway curious about the next tutorials too. Regarding clouds they could have rendered separately at a little lower resolution and comped later etc.Īnd mostly you don't need always the highest settings of the node-render settings. Using an obj does have some other caveats of course.Īn exported heighfield-displacement map could have been better maybe. So should be rendering relatively fast.įor my last animation i exported the terrain as an OBJ and render time got faster. I am curious too for the next videos.īut from my own scenes what i have seen is until you go to a certain threshold clouds takes longer to render (that depends actually too on the settings).īut if you have a very displaced terrain with many nodes that can take a long time to render too (with compute nodes etc).īut this terrain doesn't look like that kind of terrain.
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