Descriptions in blue
Examples in green

Setup commands

These are defined only once at the beggining of a script.

InitAnim BaseName, StartFrame - Must be included. BaseName is the name of the BMP that will be rendered. Terragen adds the frame number to the BaseName. BaseName should be enclosed in "quotes". StartFrame tells Terragen at which frame to start at as well as the initial position of clouds if CloudVel is used.

InitAnim "c:\frames\anim", 1 would render the frames as 'anim0001.bmp, anim0002.bmp, etc' on the C drive in a folder called 'frames'.

CloudPos X, Y - This is the initial position for the clouds at frame 1

CloudVel Speed, Heading - This tells Terragen to move the clouds in direction 'heading' at speed 'speed' every frame.

Indevidual frame commands

These are used optionally for every frame.

CamPos X, Y, Z - Sets the camera's position in Terrain units.

TarPos X, Y, Z - Sets the target's position in Terrain units.

CamH head - Sets the camera's heading in degrees. This automatically modifies the target's position.

CamP pitch - Sets the camera's pitch in degrees. This automatically modifies the target's position.

CamB bank - Sets the camera's bank in degrees. The angle is relative to the horizon.

Zoom Z - Set's the camera's zoom.

Exp E - Set's the camera's exposure.

SunDir head, alt - Sets the heading and altitude of the sun in degrees.

Frame rendering

FRend - Renders the frame and saves it using BaseName as the initial filename.

There are a few script generators available for free! Most of these have a friendly user interface. If you have Terragen well then you have Scripter, a small script generator that will create simple camera, cloud and sun movements in a matter of seconds.

Camera Path Editor is a very good script editor. Most recent version is 3.2. It creates perfect curved paths for smooth motion. It would take to long to describe every feature here but clicking on the link will take you to it's home page.

Terranim 1.0 is an equally good script generator. It's a little different than CamPath but users will have no trouble moving from one program to another. Both these programs offer a 3D preview of your animation!

Once you have finished rendering your animation, it would be nice to see it as a movie and not 642 seperate BMP's! There are many programs which will take numbered BMP's and compile then into one AVI.

Saving as AVI

I reccomend Fast Movie Processor to do it. It's free for any non-commercial use and it's very simple to use. It even has a variety of effects you can apply to your movie!

Saving as MOV

Sorenson Video with a quality of 50-85% is definatelly the best QuickTime compression around!

Saving as MPG

Once you've saved your AVI, I reccomend using AVI2MPG to convert your animations to MPG. With this, they will be cross-platform and much smaller in size. Here are a few setting you can use for the best result:

Write these in the DOS prompt. Make sure that your AVI and AVI2MPG are in the root directory. The '-n' command is for 'no sound'.