Multifarious Pursuits » Computer Graphics

First Render with Terragen 2

Mr X — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:19:08 +0000

Terragen is a scenery generator, created with the goal of generating photo realistic landscape images and animations. The original Terragen was/is available as a free download from Planetside. Terragen 2 was released as a technology preview with a beta release scheduled for Feb 2008. I played around a little with Terragen and made some test animations. I recently purchased Terragen 2 Deep + Animation and am now getting to know its capabilities.

Here is my first render with Terragen 2 (T2). I followed the basic tutorial and this is the result. It took about 37 mins to render (3.0 GHz, 1GB RAM).

Spacecraft Communications

Mr X — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:05:30 +0000

Do you remember what the Astronauts sounded like during the Apollo program? What? Not old enough to have seen it or too old to remember? Well then, have a listen to this. I thought I would try to duplicate that classic sound. Its all about the Quindar tones. I added some pink noise, white noise and brown noise to some bandpass filtered and compressed audio along with the tones.

“Universal” Globe

Mr X — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 06:31:59 +0000

Here is the opening from Heather’s leadership video. Its a ripoff of the Universal Globe. Paragon is the name of Heather’s gymnastics team. Used Blender to make this. The Globe is a sphere with the “blue marble” earth map as a texture. Extruded text to make the “Paragon” letters (one letter at a time). Made a curve path for the letters to follow. Ripped the music from a DVD and presto.

3D Model of a MiG-15

Mr X — Thu, 17 May 2007 06:36:22 +0000

Used Blender and Adobe Illustrator to make this model. Grabbed some blue prints from a Russian web site (including contour sections). Used Illustrator to trace the contours and the top and side views. Imported the resulting 2D drawings into Blender as a background image. Set up three views in Blender (top, front, side) and aligned the background image in each view. Traced the contour lines with a 3D entity in Blender. Aligned the contours in 3D space and interpolated to create necessary number of ribs. Connected the vertices on the ribs and created faces (to skin the hull). Used essentially the same technique to make the wings and horizontal stab. Grabbed a humanoid figure from the web (a Blender model) and used as the pilot. Notice the canopy renders as transparent. Used Gimp to paint the cammo stripe texture, then UV mapped the texture in Blender to get the paint job. Composited the model with a photo of my desk to make the image you see here. Used this MiG-15 model in the “Fly-by” short.

Asteroid Test

Mr X — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:52:51 +0000

Here is a test sequence showing an asteroid floating thru space towards earth. It hits the Earth’s atmosphere and glows red before turning into a fireball. I used concentric spheres to model the Earth and its atmosphere. The Earth turned out ok, but the atmosphere isn’t quite right. The asteroid’s trajectory is too shallow so it skips out of the atmosphere instead of penetrating it. This was just a proof of concept to play with curve paths and camera tracking. Might try this again but using Terragen to model planet Earth instead.

Terrain Demo

Mr X — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:02:31 +0000

This is a demonstration of the use of Blender, Terragen (.9), and Digital Eleveation Model (DEM) data. Downloaded DEM data from USGS for the Dixie Valley area NE of Fallon, NV. Used the 3DEM tool to convert the DEM data to a Terragen terrain file (.TER). Used Terranim to set up a camera track for Terragen (path for the camera to travel and target for the camera to point at). Rendered the sky and landscape in Terragen (output to sequence of .BMP files). Used a Python script (Ter2Blend_v4p.py) from the web to convert the TER file to a mesh in Blender. Used another Python script (cameraanim_v4p.py) to import the Terranim camera path into blender. Imported an existing X-wing fighter model (from the web) into the Blender sceen with the 3D mesh. Set up a curve path for the X-wings to follow over the terrain mesh. Rendered the X-wings flying over the ground as a TARGA sequence (rendered the X-wings only, not the mesh). Used the Blender node compositor to composit the X-wings and the terrain together.