How to export Terragen lanDscape meshes
        and import them into Truespace

 

 

 

 

Purpose:

Have you thought about  how they make thoose great looking landscapes 
in 3d. Well as usual there are several ways, like modelling them from a plane 
or to let a plug-in do the work, these all work.

But to get them really nice they will be either timeconsuming
modelling them or a lots of tries before getting a good result with
the plug-ins and even then you have limited control.

There are a better way though. Ever seen theese nice images made
with Terragen and wondered if only I could get them into Truespace?

Well we can't get the whole image, only as a background then,
but we can have the landscape mesh, and that's really nice, becouse
they are so smooth and still quite complex meshes so you will allways 
find something you wants, it's harder not to.

And offcourse you can set up Terragen in any way you wants it, low 
canyones to high mountains striking in the horisont to whole oceanes 
with lot of clippary hills, you decides and now we're going to get all this 
into truespace so we can think about the scene instead.

 

This is how:

* Get Terragen.

* Functions, making lanscape controls and reading image maps.

* Export landscape object.

* Load mesh-object in truespace.

* Add textures.

* Render.

 

Get Terragen:

Download Terragen here:                 http://www.terragen.de/tgdownload.htm

Try the German site if the English one doesn't work, could be temporarly
or he shut it down while working at his new job. Also here you will find
great info and tutorials, special files etc, it's a whole community you now!

 

Terragen is a complete landscape simulator made by M.P.Fairclough
with everything from sunsets to clouds settings to any kind of lands-
cape, desert to ocean.

And the output are just marvellous looking increadible real just like
standing there looking out over it all. And you can bring it all to life
acting as god or just for having plenty of fun.

You can allways register this program as this will give you maximum
resolution and free uppgrades in the future, and from what you can
do with it it's just an outstanding price, meaning if you like it you do
afford to buy it without hesitating, that's nice.

 

Wonderful picture - pic1)

 

 

Functions:

Not much to know here, basicly four things and then a lot of playing
around, theese four things are:

Render Preview
Generating Terrain
Camera/Targeting position
Sculpting Tools

We will only work in Rendering Control and Landscape windows.

 

Basic controls pic2)

 

 

Render Preview:

In the Render Control window you have the Render Preview that you
will access often, to check how you're doing.

By keeping the Detail setting in the middle you will be able to check
this a lot of times as the render time will be set to seconds, the detail
kind of lacks details though but this is excelent to start out with and
then when you're getting there you increase the detail settings to max.

And when you're pretty convinced you make a large render, 640 x 480
or 800 x 600, depending of what you like, press Render Image and wait
a couple of minutes, not many though.

When the image is done you will also be able to save it as a .bmp if
you want to.

 

 

Generating Terrain:

When pressing Generate Terrain you'll get up the Terrain Genesis.

Here you can alter what kind of random generated terrain you want,
and what kind of method, also possible to add features to an existing
terrain, so you can start out low and then add canyones and mountains
and lakes one after the other.

Press Generate Terrain and Close after that the Status field is ready,
redo this any time for a new terrain or adding if the Acton field Generate
features on existing terrain is enabled.

 

Genesis generating? - pic3)

 

 

Camera/Targeting position:

By Left clicking you change the position of the camera but it will allways
be facing into the middle.

By right clicking you changes the middle point, this enables you to face
the camera in any direction you want, it takes a little practise though.

 

 

Sculpting Tools:

There are three sculpting tools, each with a different size, how much
they will influence when making changes to the landscape.

You can add terrain by left clicking or substract terrain by right clicking.
You will see the hight of the spot you're at and see as it grows or lowers.

Playing God? - pic4)

  Right click.                            A little more.                          Now that's something!

 

 

Export landscape object:

When you are satisfied with your view it's time to export the landscape
mesh or object as we will load it as in Truespace.

You do that in a format called Lightwave 3D Object also LWO or .lwo.

First in Landscape window under Terrain - NEW, choose Export and
Export Method should be Lightwave 3D Object and then press Select
File and Save button to choose a name and place it where you want to, 
it's good to keep it to a project of its own.

To be able to work again in Terragen you'll need to save as Raw 8 bits
format as the lwo files will not be able to load again in Terragen.

These were my views and camera settings when I exported my landscape.

 

View and landscape for export - pic5)

 

By moving the camera later I will get great shots of the big lake, it's really 
fun to play around with the camera and set up different views, you should 
do this in Terragen instead of Truespace as it's much easier and a lot faster
depending on the quality but even if it's on maximum and you can also save 
any picture anytime when you like them.

 

 

Load into Truespace:

Fire your version of Truespace up and set it up to a new scene. We're going
to load our landscape mesh object into Truespace.

Choose File and Load Object then browse down to the file you saved
and press ok, then set to none at Object Unit Scale and enable Center object
but skip Fix Normals and again press OK, can always fix that later.

 

Import Settings - pic6)

 

Now you have to scale and rotate to set up the scene until you're satisfied, 
could take some time but just be patient. Don't forget that moving and zoom-
ing are two very different things also I had to scale a lot in the y axis to make 
it look as close as posible to what it did in Terragen. Set up the scene to 
your likings and then lets add some color.

 

 

Add Textures:

Now you can make your own textures by painting or using marble and 
bumps and so on or use products like Shaderlab and DarkTree Simbiont.  

 

Shaderlab                              http://www.primitiveitch.com/shaderlab/index.html

DarkTree Simbiont                            http://www.darksim.com/html/forts.html


For the Shaderlab you have alot of shaders made by Tom Grimes that's free 
for use and also his TG pack that could do some magic when making land-
scapes.

Tom Grimes                                            http://www.tgrimes.fsbusiness.co.uk/

 

 

Render:

This is when you get your results back to you and that's a great reward, 
don't forget though it could take forever to get it the right way as you wants 
it and someone else might not agree with you.

But the point is when you're happy don't forget to keep the feeling...

 

Endpic - who sad I was happy?)

 

Enjoy!
                                                                                            

 SeYa/Ambrose...                                                           

 Please feel free to contact me at...                     pappaxang@hotmail.com