Animations & backbuffer

I am working on an animation. I want to pan the camera, and have the back-buffer updated so it does not keep showing the same image. Is there a tutorial on this? I do hope blender has a way to do it.
Also, in terragen, is there a way to render a scene so that the sides can overlap perfectly for a job like this?
Thankyou.

Hmm. I’m pretty sure that the backbuffer will only display a static image to the size of the render, so you won’t actually be able to pan around a backbuf by moving the camera. Two solutions:

  1. Render a 360 degree sphere image of your environment and map it onto background sphere in blender. You camera pans will be reflected appropriately, but the quality will (probably) be unacceptable.

  2. Use a series of images for the backbuffer. The blender 2.0 guide has instructions on how to do this, as I don’t know it off the top of my head. Someone else here might. You’d have to have a series of images for the backbuffer that mimic your camera motions in Blender. I seem to remember someone here talking about camera matching in Blender and Terragen within the last few weeks… wait a moment…

Ah. Here we go.

https://blenderartists.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=707&highlight=terragen+camera

It’s mostly a discussion of terrain sizing, but includes some interesting stuff regarding camera matching. Of course, I’m assuming that you’re using Terragen for your backbuffered image. If not, then doh!

You could also use an animated texture on the World with the Paper option On (in the Wolrd buttons).

Martin

Ok I will first make an animation of terragen, then load that into the buffer. What format does the backbuffer support for animated files?
If I make it 1 frame a sec, then I have to tell blender to render 1 frame a sec also right?

You can all set these things in the texture buttons (if you use the world texture solution). However, 1 frame sec would be choopy IMHO.

Martin

The simplest way:

Use Ter2Blend
from: http://users.skynet.be/sky33676/index.html

The entire terrain will be loaded in Blender. If you animate the camera in Terragen, you can import the path and use it in Blender. The website has tutorials to be able to match up the motion and the Terragen scenes.