Day 8

At the conclusion of Day 7 I had gotten through the Terragen Topo Map video (http://www.vimeo.com/8584046) that showed how to render a particular Terragen terrain (.TER) file into a bitmap (.BMP) file.  This was pretty cool and I felt real proud of myself until I realized that this procedure would have to be repeated for each of the 110 tiles in my Caesar Creek  scenery – ouch.  Well, it wasn’t too bad after all.  Each tile takes about 5 seconds to render at 512 x 512 (I have the free version of Terragen with a 512×512 limit), so it actually took more time to select .TER files and save .BMP files than it did to render the tiles.  I was able to do all 110 manually in about 1 hour, including re-doing about 20 or 30 tiles when I discovered I had somehow managed to render them without the strata bmp files active (don’t ask – I have no idea how I did it).

As I slogged through the files, I kept saying to myself,  “I know there must be a way to automate this process – this has to be impossibly tedious at the higher resolutions when the individual tile render times become significant”.  And of course, there is – Hitzi’s wonderful TerragenForCondor (TFC) progarm.  In fact, the very next video in ASH33M’s sequence describes how to use it to automate tile rendering.  If I had read ahead a little bit, I wouldn’t have had to manually render 110 tiles.  OTOH, if I *hadn’t* manually rendered 110 tiles, I probably wouldn’t appreciate Hitzi’s TerragenForCondor program! ;-).

TFC operates as a shell program that repeatedly launches (calls?) Terragen.exe  for each .TER file in a folder, rendering with the current settings into a .BMP file that is saved in a selected output folder.   The image below shows the TFC screen as it initially comes up, before doing anything.  Hitzi has done a nice job with this, putting some hint text in each field.

The first field ‘Terragen location’ threw me just a bit, but the video explained that this is where you select the location of Terragen.exe – makes sense – TFC has to know where to locate the executable if it is going to call it repeatedly.

The next field is the render settings location, and this turns out to be the .TGW (Terragen World) file containing the ‘world’ settings, including the settings to be used for rendering (this is also where the infamous references to ‘strata.bmp’ and ‘strata1.bmp’ appear.    In my scenery, as in the example Crete scenery, this is located in the ‘Terragen_Topo’ subfolder.

The next two, Terrain files location and Bitmap files location seem to be pretty straightforward.  In my case, since I had already manually rendered all 110 files, I created a new empty folder called ‘topo_map_tfc’ and used it as the bitmap target.

The ‘Dont render…’ checkbox is pretty straightforward, and it basically allows TFC to be run multiple times on the same folder set without incurring the same time penalty each time.  Maybe a subset of the renderings turn out to be incorrect for some reason and  have to be redone.

The ‘Use SoPack plugin…’ option was left unchecked for this tutorial, with a statement that this would be revealed later….

OK, so I clicked on start, and watched the gears move.  Everything flowed just exactly as if I was doing this all manually, including all the dialog boxes and noises.  A bit disconcerting, actually, so I would recommend muting the sound at the very least.  I started the process at about 5 minutes past the hour, and TFC helpfully told me about how long I could expect the entire process to take.

Unfortunately I somehow managed to interrupt it after 34 of 110 files, and it just hung there looking at me with a rendering completed but not saved.  I clicked on ‘Save’ manually and this seemed to get it going again.  Then the same thing happened again at about file #37, so I had to do the manual ‘Save..’ trick again.  I’m not sure what is happening, but if I manage to do a rendering pass for real later on, I think it would be wise to do it on another machine (or move to another machine myself).

At about file #41, TFC hung up permanently, so I got a chance to try the re-do feature with the ‘Dont render if already there’ option checked.  So, I exited from Terragen, exited from TFC, and started again.  When I got ready to restart TFC,  I noticed it had dropped a .ini file, so I was hopeful I wouldn’t have to redo all the settings – and it did indeed remember them.  In addition, it informed me that it found 70 files to render -nice.

Hmm, I was trying to move some of the Terragen windows around, and screwed TFC up again.  Guess it is sensitive to what window has the focus – makes sense for a utility that is essentially emulating mouse movements and button clicks.  Still, a ‘resume…’ feature might be nice ;-).

This time I left the computer to itself and went off to read a book for a while (Alistair Reynolds “Blue Remembered Earth”), and it finished successfully.   TFC happily crunched through all the files and let me know when it was finished.

The next tutorial in the sequence is the Terragen_Topo_Water tutorial, demonstrating how to add a ‘Sea’ layer to the Terragen World settings.  This was interesting and informative, but since my Caesar Creek scenery is completely land-locked (and mostly 900+ feet above sea level), I declined to add Terragen_Topo_Water.tgw to my setup ;-).

I think the next tutorial starts in with the PhotoShop stuff, so I’m going to have to build up my nerve (lots of beer) a bit before I tackle that.  Stay tuned!

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