Tarsier tutorial: Renderer
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What is the 'Renderer'?
Strictly speaking, a renderer is any process that produces a visual representation of some data. So a RasterView is a renderer. However, the Renderer in Tarsier conventionally refers to the main 3D renderer that is used to produce most 3D visualizations.
The Renderer draws 3D scenes described by a wide range of data, including multiple rasters, vectors, sites, etc.
Pre-requisites for this tutorial?
- Tarsier tutorial: Raster data
- Tarsier tutorial: Raster resampler - if you have a Geographic (lat/lon) raster, which would need to be converted to UTM before rendering
Using the Renderer to view some raster data and nothing else
- Open Tarsier
- Open a new Renderer
- Select File --> New --> Data Views --> Render View (if its not on the list, you need to load a DLL)
- Load some RasterData into the Renderer. The raster would normally represent elevations, as in topography or bathymetry.
- Warning: The Renderer currently only draws UTM rasters properly[1] . So if your raster is in Geographic projection (lat/lon) as it may well be if you just took the raster data tutorial and imported some Kauai data, you first need to re-sample it to UTM, and there is a re-sampling tutorial for that.
- (Once you have a UTM raster,) Select the 'Raster' tab
- If your RasterData is not yet open within Tarsier:
- Select 'Open' on the UseeControl named 'Relief'
- Navigate to the RasterData TRA file that you want to open[1]
- If your RasterData is already open within Tarsier:
- Select the drop-down arrow on the UseeControl named 'Relief'
- Select your raster from the list of currently open rasters
- Make some Terrain corresponding to the Raster (Unless this RasterData has been rendered before it probably doesn't already have Terrain associated with it).
- Click the 'Make' button
- Hit OK to confirm that you want to make some terrain tessellation files (a bit like pyramid files in ArcMap)
- Hit OK to confirm that you want to use the suggested TRNTI file name in a 'terrain' sub-folder within the folder where your raster resides.
- If your raster is very large (millions of pixels), you might have to wait several minutes it to make the terrain tessellation.
- Enable the Raster
- Click the Check Box at the top-left of the Raster tab
- Point the camera at the terrain
- Select the 'Cam1' tab
- Click one of the three buttons with a picture of a camera (middle-left)
- You should see your raster
- Change the color of your raster
- Its probably pink right now, which denotes 'NoData' - referring to the fact that you probably haven't selected a raster for it to use in deciding what color to render the terrain (as opposed to the 'Relief' raster that you used to specify how high to draw the terrain)
- Go back to the 'Raster' tab
- In the 'Raster' UseeControl, select the same raster that you are using for the Relief
- The raster should now look colored according to elevation (and shading due to different sun angles on the terrain)
- To change the color scheme, click the 'C' button, then select 'Custom' and 'Rainbow' (if its not already set to this)
- You should see different colors on the raster now
- You may need to select a different option for Color scheme (such as RGB) and re-select Custom for the colors to change - Briano 20:16, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
- Change the level of detail
- Your raster might look a bit blurry, this is to make the rendering fast. You can add detail at the expense of speed as follows.
- Select the 'Econ' tab (it stands for 'Economy' i.e. being efficient)
- Type '20' in the 'Detail' box (the default is 5)
- Type 'TAB', or click somewhere outside the box to get it to accept this value (the need for this is related to another Tarsier bug)
- Go back to the 'Raster' tab and disable then re-enable the Raster (this is only needed because of a minor refresh bug)
- Fly around your terrain
- Click 'Keys' on the 'Cam1' tab
- Type 'm' to select the view vector instead of the movement vector
- Use the arrow keys: left, right, up, down
- For more advanced flying see Tarsier: Renderer flight controls
Saving a Renderer
- In general, saving files in Tarsier is idiosyncratic, as described here.
- When saving a Renderer, you are prompted with about 20 or 30 dialog boxes! Which one's should you save, and which ones should you cancel (ESC)?
- Select File --> Save As
- Look in the heading of the dialog box, and in the 'Save as type' box to see what's being saved
- For each of the following file types, save the file name listed along with it:
- TRC: save as render.trc
- TRG: save as render.trg
- TRX: ignore for now, type ESC
- TGT: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRA x many: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRNTI: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRNTI x 3: ignore for now, type ESC
- TSD x 3: ignore for now, type ESC
- TNE: ignore for now, type ESC
- TGU: ignore for now, type ESC
- TVS: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRD: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRI: save as render.tri
- TDO: ignore for now, type ESC
- TDL: ignore for now, type ESC
- TRE: save as render.tre (this is the main one, that you can later open to open the whole Renderer)
- Check that what you did works, by closing everything, and re-opening the TRE file (render.tre)
It doesn't matter if you call the files render.tre or something_else.tre. But calling them render.tre makes it easier to keep them in one place and know what they are.
Take a screen grab of your work
- Open a Renderer (it must be named)
- Select the 'Rec' tab
- Click 'Grab one frame at 16 accums'
- A file named 'Grab_*.jpg' will appear in your working folder. Email it to impress your friends.
Notes and references
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Tarsier used to draw UTM rasters just fine, but when the terrain tessellation system was implemented (to handle very large rasters), the ability to tesselate lat/lon rasters was left behind. At present, the tesselation and rendering code attempts to handle lat/lon rasters, but the results are flawed
Who has taken this tutorial?
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- Brian
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