Landscape scene wizard question
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
Well, that didn't take long! (for me to learn something new, I mean)
I bought PhilW's 'Learning Carrara 8.5' last night, and today I started watching vids. I was tempted to skip the first several sections, after all I've been using Carrara for a while now and though 'hey, I already know how to open a scene, I probably won't need this' yet I was instantly proved wrong, as in the very 2nd video lesson (the 1st video isn't really a lesson, just a quick overview of 'I'm going to teach you a lot of wonderful stuff' so that the viewer can appreciate Phil's cultured accent) in the section about opening scenes, I realized I had never in my whole life explored opening a scene using the landscape wizard. Really neat! You can select the basic landscape shape, then cycle through various shaders and skies and it gives renders of each to show you what they look like, I can see this would be a really nifty tool indeed.
However, I have a question for anyone who knows. My landscape wizard only presents the landscape options in the 'landscape 2' folder. Yet I have lots of other landscapes, ones that came with carrara and others that were purchased as add ons (like's Dart's environkit for example). Is there a way to add these other folders and landscape options to the landscape generator wizard?
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I don't have time at the moment, but I seem to recall a simple hack/addition to the text file in the Wizard folder. It's been awhile, so I want to check it to make sure I remember it correctly. If nobody else has an answer, I'll try and get to it Saturday.
I use -
file
open presets - you should see all that you have installed
then just pick the one you want to use .
Yesss!!!!
Sorry Jon, I don't know the answer to your question short of trying moving or copying the other Landscape folder into the Landscape2 folder. I have all of my purchased Landscape scenes from Phil, mmoir, Howie Farkes, magaremoto, Ringo, etc., as well as evilproducer's cool Fantasy Village, all in my Landscape2 folder, so I'd imagine that they'll work in the wizard... I'll have to try it.
But... I actually came to tell you that I joined the club and bought the "Learning Carrara 8.5" and the "Realistic Rendering" digital downloads... downloading them all as we speak - ahh... Disc 1 of the second set is done. One more disc and I'll be off the internet for the rest of the night. Phil's coming over and we're going to discuss Carrara until I fall asleep! ;)
That of course works for loading any preset for whatever (terrain/sky/shader) I might be working on at the time, but not in the same way that the initial landscape wizard does upon creation. See the landscape wizard let's you choose a shape of a terrain, then add any sky from the list of presets, then add a shader from any of the presets and it renders each step of the way in a quick mini render so you can see how they combine with each other. You can take the shape of the paradise beach preset, for example, and shader it so that it looks like a snowy mountain with a valley, then add a clear summer day realistic sky and see how that all goes together all before actually loading the scene. I think it's a cool quick way of previewing what you're putting together.
The problem is it only has a few of the actual preset options that are out there as visible to be put together, unfortunately, and I was hoping for some way around this to add more possibilities so I can play around a bit more pre-viz before deciding on what I"m loading.
On the other hand, it seems only able to load scenes in large size, which is just about useless for me, so maybe it's just as well.
That seems like a brilliant solution but when I tried to copy all the items of my Lanscape folder into the Landscape 2 folder, it does show them as icons in the wizard but won't load or allow me to select them (just gives an error message).
Here's what's crazy, I can see that the Skies tab has some of Howie's products I've bought as some of the options that can be chosen. And the Shaders tab has some of your own environkit shaders I can choose from (3 for terrains 2 for water) so that means there must be some way of making the landscape wizard see and use non-native scenes, shaders, and skies and use them. But I can't seem to figure out how...
Hmmmm.... hopefully evilproducer can come through with that method he was talking about, which sounds like a better option anyways.
But I wonder what the error was all about. When I get some time, I'll try to look into that. I think that I may be able to figure out some of this... but it takes some digging.
Sorry I got back to this so late.
I'm using atmospheres in the Landscape Scene Wizard for this example as I haven't stuck custom terrains into the scene presets folders. The same principles should apply.
If you're on a Mac, you will need to show the package content for this. Don't know how Windows handles it.
The path would look like this:
Right Click (Control Click) Carrara application icon: Show Package Contents--> Content--> MacOS--> Presets--> Atmosphere--> Realistic.
Inside the Realistic folder you will see the .cbr scene files. If you have third party or your own custom atmospheres they may be in here. They can be at the top level of this folder or in nested folders. You will also see files called infos.txt and infosFR.txt The FR version is french.
Those two text files contain a description of the scene files in the folder, and the description appears in the Landscape Scene wizard. You can have files appear in the Landscape Scene wizard without being included in the text file- they just won't have a handy-dandy description. What I was remembering was editing the text file to include my description for my custom atmosphere.
To add your custom or third party landscapes, the path is Carrara icon: Show Package Content--> Contents--> MacOS--> Scenes. You can edit the LSWizard.txt file to include your own custom landscape folder, or simply add your own landscapes to the Landscape2 folder.
I tried this with my own simple terrains, but when I select them, I get nil-pointer errors. I can still select them and load them. After the terrain loads, I get the nil-pointer error again, but things look correct. Anybody have any ideas as to the cause? At first I thought it was scene files with other elements in them besides the terrain, but even simple terrains do this.