Importing DFX files from Terragen

[LukeW]

Rhysy 2:
Well I saw the plane bounce up and down. Then I subdivided it and saw it bend as well during animation. If I turn “Cycl” off it goes flat for some reason. I wonder if there is a way of stopping it moving during animation - I thought sonixsculpt’s suggestion was to use it in a non-moving terrain…

[Alltaken]

@Rhysy 2

create a plane that is exactly (exactly did i say that already) the size of the landscape from the top view. (delete one edge on this plane).

duplicate it so that there are the same number of planes as pieces of the landscape. join one plane to each piece(this is to get the texture to line up correctly)

I don’t quite follow this bit. You want a three edged plane duplicated to each piece of the landscape ? By piece I assume you mean each seperate mesh ? Also I don’t know what you mean by joining the plane the each section, I can’t see how this would do anything. If you could just clarify this bit, I can get on with blending !

i’ll post a screen shot top down and explain.

as you can see there are two faint perple lines running down the side of the landscape

adding the plane makes the physical size (top down) of all the pieces(seperate meshs) equal to each other.

as you can see in the screen shot.

this helps line up all the textures when applied (flat , orco) this makes the texture rendered in terragen line up perfectly with the features on the terrain (try texturing without doing this and you will understand)

why did i delete one edge?
to get rid of the face (so it would not be rendered)
and because you don’t need it.

hope that answerd the question.

i suppose you could do a texture using uv mapping instead.

[sonix]

[quote="LukeW I can’t find anything called “Wave Length” and I can’t set things like “height” and “width” to 300… BTW, I’m using Blender 2.23. I tried it on a plane which I subdivided a couple times. I’ve tried lots of kinds of lighting but it doesn’t seem to work at all. Could you explain how to do it in 2.23 - i.e. what values I need to change, etc? (The exact names of things) .[/quote]

It seems as though you may not have created a wava aniimation but a particle animation.

To far the right of the Add Effect there is a button one of the usual Blender white minus burrons, presss and select Wave.
The Wave properties sliders should now be there.

If you have already done this that’s all good, If someone reads this who has upload space for th Blend file I’ll gladly send it to you

Sonix

[Rhysy_2]

Thanks alltaken, I understand now. Adding planes will be quicker than learning UV mapping…

I now have a 513*513 Terragen landscape in Blender ! I’ll do some texturing and lighting and post a pic to prove it…

[LukeW]

@sonixsculpt

To far the right of the Add Effect there is a button one of the usual Blender white minus burrons, presss and select Wave.
The Wave properties sliders should now be there.

If you have already done this that’s all good, If someone reads this who has upload space for the Blend file I’ll gladly send it to you

Sonix

Hi,
I was in the “wave” area… the buttons it has are things like “Sta x”, “Sta y”, “Speed”, “Height”, “Width”, “Narrow”, “Time sta”, “Lifetime”, “Damptime”, “X”, “Y” and “Cycl”. I can’t see a property called “Length”. Also, did your tip about having two sets of waves on the terrain involve non-moving waves or animated waves? During an animation it wouldn’t be very realistic for hills to move…

[LukeW]

alltaken/Rhysy 2:
If you have terrain that is in large pieces in blender you will be able to see the joins in it if you are close enough and you are using smoothing…

[sonix]

@LukeW

Hi,
I was in the “wave” area… the buttons it has are things like “Sta x”, “Sta y”, “Speed”, “Height”, “Width”, “Narrow”, “Time sta”, “Lifetime”, “Damptime”, “X”, “Y” and “Cycl”. I can’t see a property called “Length”. Also, did your tip about having two sets of waves on the terrain involve non-moving waves or animated waves? During an animation it wouldn’t be very realistic for hills to move…

Sorry, I implied length meaning wave Lifetime.

I wouldn’t advise you to use this method for animations, as you correctly pointed out, the waves will move.

I use this method for Still renders.

Sonix.

[Dittohead]

@alltaken

Dittohead it is a good idea so take it back my method works totaly differently to ter2blend (which is good but renders in terragen)

thanks “rhysy 2” it makes me happy that someone else is using my method. (pm me if you need harder help)

ok how i do it as i think i first had trouble.

1. export as “faces” individual polygons therefore 4-6 repitions of each vertex. (i will go and try the other method too of )

2. then i import it and remove doubles in edit mode, on all the mesh parts. after that i join as many parts ~5 to make larger parts ~4 large parts.

it thinks for a while about it all as the dxf file for me was about 100Mb

-----------important read--------

thinking about it
symptom (couldn’t see anything but could do stuff after it finished thinking)

answer ----go to top view and zoom out a long way then select the mesh and shrink it down a lot.

alternative ---- reduce the export to 0.1 or less dxf units per terragen unit

should work ----- and ignor the first stuff i wrote these two ideas will have worked.

(if you want to use ter2blend note that the mesh is an inacurate size and the texture will not line up, also it is very poor detail as the mesh has been created at a very low poly count)

send me a pic when you have done and tell me how deailed it is i have yet to really explore my own techniques (just thought about how to do it for a while)

bye

i was talking about his idea… DOH!!!