The Making of "Four Seasons in One Day"
"Four Seasons in One Day" is an animation project I undertook to test out
several ideas I had for animations. The aim was to extend the possibilities of
Terragen animations to provide more interesting and/or more realistic effects
than is capable with a single Terragen world. The project would combine the
output from a few different programs, but in the end, individual frames would be
straight Terragen renders without any post processing.
Terratweak was used to:
- change surface colours and distributions to simulate the changing of seasons
- change the weather during the day
- animate the sun to provide a sunrise and sunset
- alter the lighting and atmosphere settings to match the sun altitude
Terranim supplied the TGS script defining camera position and camera target for each frame and I wrote a small Filemaker Pro database to generate the DOS command lines for rendering individual frames.
Story Board
In order to determine which keyframes were needed a rough story board was required, with the appropriate method for each part of the story determined. The animation simulates a single day from sunrise to sunset with the seasons changing from winter through spring, summer, autumn and eventually back to winter. This required two issues to be considered separately and then combined later to provide the final set of key frames.