TUTORIALS
IMPORTANT REMARKS!
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INTRODUCTION
Do you know Terragen or Blender ?
Both are fantastic 3D programs with their own specialities:
- Terragen is written by Matt Fairclough and is the best off all programs in breathtaking landscapes and magnificent skies. It has an easy interface and you will render your first mindblowing realistic landscape in the first five minutes after you installed the program!
REMARK: Terragen is a Windows only program! - Blender is the brain child of Ton Roosendaal and is an amazing powerful all-round 3D program of world class and is great for modeling, rendering, animation,... This program has it all. This results, like all other 3D packages, in a rather complex user interface. But with a bit of practice you will discover that Blender is fun and very easy to use.
And last but not least: both fantastic programs are free !!
A great feature to unlock the full power of Blender is the possibility to write your own programs with the aid of Python . No, here I don't mean a big fat snake but a high level, object oriented scripting language. Python is indeed very powerful and is quite easy to master.
So I wrote a script combining the best skills of both programs. The result?
TER2BLEND
Here an example of one of my first tries with the Ter2Blend-script....
How does Ter2Blend work?
With Terragen you make a beautiful landscape. Render the picture and save it. Save also the Terragen terrain file (*.ter file) and write down the coordinates of the camera and target, the waterlevel and the sun's heading and altitude.
Start Blender. Load the Ter2Blend script and input the ter file and other coordinates.
Ter2Blend creates fake surfaces that only get shadows for the terrain and the water. It also places the Blender camera so the surfaces will match exactly the landscape of the Terragen picture. Next there are some Blender lights placed on the same location of the Terragen sun.
Now do an import of your blender objects and Push that Draw button. Blender objects and the Terragen terrain are rendered seamless!!
It is also possible to import Terragen script files (*.tgs file) and so work with a moving camera! This means e.g. you can fly over mountains and canyons while chasing those F16-fighters!!
Step 1 : make a beautiful picture with Terragen.
Save it and convert it with e.g. PSP , PS, GIMP,... to a TGA file.
Step 2 : Start Blender. Put the TGA file in the backbuf.
Fire up Ter2Blend and import the .ter file.
Put your Blender objects in the scene and push that RENDER button.
Step 3 : et voila!!! Low flying ufo thing over a mountainous plateau.
Scaling the shadow down and you get a high flying ufo over a mountainous plateau :)
Here is another movie (867 kB).This time with an import of a Terragen script file. This means that the camera is moving too ! Instant Total Immersive Illusion !!
Another example: Stonehenge, the Blender objects are now placed on the ground.
The grass is the result of Blender's static particle generator.
The fine models of the spacecraft (an A Wing from Star Wars) and Stonehenge used in the pictures come from Michael D'Andrea .
And a picture made with Blender 2.14
The nice space crafts (Remember Battlestar Galactica?) are made by Mister Cujo31
A picture made with the Forester2Blend script.
The magnificent skull is from Catchfraze
Push the big button to download the Ter2Blend scripts!
IMPORTANT REMARK: BEFORE WORKING WITH THE SCRIPTS READ THE TUTORIALS
There are still some things to do:
- Make it possible to work with terrains bigger than 257 x 257 (even now there is some clipping to 255 x 255). The problem is that this will slow down the working with blender considerable and probably blow out the memory out of your computer...
- import an animated sun (tgs-file) in Ter2Blend
- make a program to convert lists of bmp to tga ready to use with Blender
- do the dishes, mow the lawn,...
TER2BLEND TUTORIALS
CG FOR VIDEO
MY GALLERY
LINKS
Get the tutorials as Word document
This web site is build by Guy Van Rentergem and was updated 04-October-2003
You can mail me at: guy.van.rentergem@skynet.be