I was browsing the forums and was going through the "Recommended Free Program" area, and came across a 3D terrain rendering program called Terragen so I decided to give it a try.Ã, I was AMAZED at its power and ease of use.Ã, I tinkered with it for about 30 minutes and got my first video done with it.Ã, I am SO AMAZED at this program, especially considering it is free.
The potential this program has for the AGS games is phenominal.Ã, I will be using this video with some other stuff I have in the works for the intro movie and so forth for my game.Ã, I also will include cutscenes with this thing.Ã,Â
Anyways, tell me what you think of my first 3D rendered background animation.Ã, The resolution is very low (for speed so I could make sure it came out ok before cranking up the resolution for the next rendering), so the filesize is about 1 megabyte.Ã,Â
It plays in 15 frames per second, so it is pretty smooth.Ã, Criticism is welcome, like camera angles, height, etc, etc.
I WILL be removing the occasional freeze (it was 4 sections of animation combined into 1).
www.cmtonline.net/intro.avi
UPDATE NOVEMBER 18, 2004
I just finished rendering it and making one additional frame where a jutting of land comes up, and the final frame is the menu-screen from my new game with the title etched into the rock.
DIV-X HI RES : http://www.cmtonline.net/DivX_Intro.avi (2.6mb)
INDEO_5 HI RES : http://www.cmtonline.net/Indeo5-Intro.avi (8mb)
I did the Indeo because I did it on accident one time I compiled, and noticed the video quality was quite a bit better than the DivX version. So I am keeping it too :)
I think there is something wrong with the file. I can't play it and it's not because of my player which can play avi-files. I've tried it several times, but still doesn't work for me...
It is compressed in MPEG-4 / Div-X format.Ã, Do you have the codec installed?
As an aside to this, I tried converting it into several various other formats, but the filesize was 40-50 megabytes. I abandoned that idea pretty quickly.
I have downloaded the file off my website (thinking something might've gone wrong with the upload, but it played fine in my Media Player 9 with WinXP Pro SP2).
Nope, I didn't, but I have now. Looks really good for just 30 minutes of work, but there are some black areas here and there that are quite disturbing. It definately has a lot of potential. Maybe I'll try this proggy myself.
Nice job...
You should read the texturing tutorial linked at the homepage, it's really great. Besides, did you know that you can transfer terragen files to other 3d-Renderers/modellers?
There sure is helluva lot of potential in that program, I'd say!
The black spots are because of the super-low resolution :)
I have converted 1/2 of it to hi-res graphics, and it looks pretty sharp. It also has no black spots :)
I will check out that website and into the other options. I had no idea that other stuff was inter-linkable with it.
Thanks!
whoah! Pretty nice.
30 minutes of work? Terragen took me at least five minutes to render each frame! How long did your half-hour work take to render? ;)
Anyway, I didn't believe Terragen could do such nice scene.
But then again, I didn't try it too much - 3ds max 6 + Dreamscape 2 is all I need to finish this life peacefully and powerfully :D
Hahaha :)
I used the program for about 10 minutes to figure out how the Camera Positioning (X, Y, Z Coordinates) worked, and then I used the scripter to compile 4 individual scripts to move the camera where I wanted it. Then I used the animation mode and it rendered/saved the pictures in order. I chose 45 to 60 frames per scene, with 15FPS so it would be nice and smooth.
I run a P4 2.6ghz with about 512mb RAM so it didn't take that long to render. The longest part I've noticed is the water.
Nice animation...
water looks very nice
Critics:
-surface,,,add more layers
-the tarrain is too fake,,,try terragen's terrain generator o terraformer or , the one i like best, world machine
-clouds look to flat
-the edge of the tarrain is visible in some parts
the atmo is up to you...
the rest looks fine
pd: i forgot!! try lowering the gamma for more contrast! i generally use 1.4
i like to use terragen too,...it's a great program. i have gotten some interesting otherworldly terrains by using various grayscale procedural textures saved as .raw in photoshop. the built in ones are good too. especially the perlin noise.