Extreme Terragen!! Virtual tour of my world

[emprworm]

I have been doing some serious "terragening".

i created a moonscape and did a video of it. dont even ask how many renders they took! hint: over 1000.

but I didn't do them manually, i did them via scripts, then linked them into an AVI video, and finally compressed them into a streaming video file.

Check out my world everyone!!

For people on 56k modems, you can see my mini-tour, only 106KB:

www.songwave.com/video/moonscape.wmv

OR,

take the full tour! 1.33 MB streaming

www.songwave.com/video/moontour.wmv

windows streaming media. All of it was done in Terragen, btw.

Let me know whatcha think!!

[anklbter8]

hey i thought it was pretty cool. 8) Maybe you could add background music for added effect.

[VigilVirus]

Woah, nice :)

[Muad dib]

That is cool. And some sound would be nice too like what anklbter8 said.

[thomas]

nice GJ.

[Andrew]

As a fellow terragener, the moon landscape waqs very well done and looked the moon's surface. 50 seconds?!!?!?!? that must have taken a very long time, as mine are between 20-30 I think. You could also experiment with less resolution but with more detail(ie widescreen, smaller) thus you get more detail and longer video on smaller resolution but takes about same time. 1000 frames is alot. The most i had was 508 and was very low detail at 800*600 resolution (which was over 5 mb). It took about 2 or more hours though.

Great job!

Was the video compressed any? ie. was it compressed twice or just the once into media player? how did you makea it into the media player? I used bink and smacker tools to view my videos.

[emprworm]

ok here is what I did.

I created an 1100 or so frame script.

ran it in Terragen, which rendered 1100 480 X 320 high res pictures. Took about 11 hours (let it run overnight). The pictures are all sequentially named (fortunately).

then used a program called "fast movie processor" which creates an AVI movie out of all 1100 frames.

but AVI is 32 MB. Not good.

I use the free Windows Media Encoder from microsoft, to encode the AVI into a WMV (streaming video file). it goes from 32MB-->1.33MB. That is some killer compression!!

[Andrew]

Were they high detail at highest level?

11 hours seems a long time..at around 500kb each a lot of hard drive too.

[Timenn]

I think that is a limitation of Terragen. But the shadows on the moon are not totally black, while they should be

[IxianMace]

For people on 56k modems, you can see my mini-tour, only 106KB:

www.songwave.com/video/moonscape.wmv

OR,

take the full tour! 1.33 MB streaming

www.songwave.com/video/moontour.wmv

1.33MB is nothing for a 56k modem, connected at 44000 bps anyway, and with an average transfer rate of about 4.0KB/s. Thankyou, however, for considering the 56k users in this world, of which I am one of. ;)

EDIT: Ok, I tried playing the full tour, and for some reason it just stayed all black. No video, no audio. Nothing... ???

[emprworm]

hmm....make sure you have windows media 9. its encoded using the WM9 codec (which is the latest version)

go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and see if you have a WM update.

[Dunenewt]

How do you make a movie out of the pictures?

[VigilVirus]

Using special software to combine them obviously ::) (just think of it like a slideshow just a lot faster)

[emprworm]

lol, yea! its a slide show of many...MANY individual renderings.

basically, you take 1000 renderings, and put them together in a quick 40 second clip at 25 frames per second...and wallah!

[Dunenewt]

What software did you use to put them together

[Khan]

Wow :O :O

Must of taken so long

But so worth it