Mountain cloud test (animation)

[bigben]

Nothing overly fancy. Just a quick test at placing clouds using a mask derived from the terrain (heightfield image blurred in Photoshop). I shot myself in the foot a bit with the mask as I did the contrast adjustment in Photoshop which left me too little room to widen the mask in TG.

The view from above just has a plain white surface for snow and lakes added to the terrain.  While that was rendering I added the rivers to the water mask for the distant render ... and moved the cloud mask 400m towards the camera

<update>
I've made an animated version of this cloud layer, with an image map to restrict the clouds around the mountains.

http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/cloud_test2.avi 3.8Mb, DivX

[old_blaggard]

I think your upper clouds could use a bit of tweaking; maybe larger feature sizes to make their density seem more realistic?

[bigben]

Thank OB... I'd just stuck in the upper cloud layer for reference, so they're just default altocumulus at the moment.

I was thinking of toying with some low level cirrus next to try and simulate mist rising from the surface of the the lakes.

[rcallicotte]

I like the second picture.  Dreamy.

[bigben]

I've started experimenting with cloud animation and will be rendering a test over the weekend.

[attachthumb=#1]
First and last frames

Animated variables include (apart from sun and cirrus cloud movement):

• Increasing cloud coverage adjust
• Cloud movement from left to right
• Animate cloud shapes (Translate cloud fractal along Y axis)
• Increasing cloud thickness
• Adjust white and black levels of cloud restriction mask, increasing distribution from right to left (against wind)

The last one should be interesting, since rather than just having clouds move, they should spawn a certain distance from the mountains and grow as they move towards it. As time goes on and the clouds get denser and thicker they will spawn further away from the mountains.  Being my first test I'm expecting some of the timing to need adjusting for the various effects but it will be interesting to see how they pan out.

The lighting will be different as I've added fill lights and disabled GI. The fill lights are also animated as I've modified the colour of one of them to be a more saturated blue to provide a reverse light to the sun. This light is positioned oppposite the sun, with the other 2 at 120° intervals.

[dhavalmistry]

cool man...you really are doing some crazy things and setting new heights of the software....will be waiting for the animation....

[rcallicotte]

Groovy, Ben.  I love to see what you can do.

[bigben]

With a bit of luck it may be ready on Monday.  I have two PCs running two CLI renders each.  From what I've seen so far, I have one tweak already planned for the next render (maintaining the blur on the edge of the image map) but for now you'll have to trust me that TG2 makes very sexy cloud animations

[Oshyan]

I played a bit with cloud animation a while back before the TP release. I got some cool results but never really had time to render it at high enough detail to be worth showing. So I'm rather looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

- Oshyan

[bigben]

At the risk of howls of protest here's a link to a preview of the last 350'ish frames.... DivX
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/cloud_test2.avi 2.8Mb.  The start frames are nearly done, but the PC running that end was slower.

Note that this is a test, so the speeds need tweaking, but you get the idea from the effects.  The horizontal movement is too slow and the vertical displacement of the fractal could be slowed as well... and I've already mentioned the masking also needs fixing.

I particularly like the bottom corners.  Follow a cloud in the bottom left and watch it change as it moves along, and watch the cloud in the hollow of the mountain in the bottom right..

I've attached a clip file of the two cloud layers with the settings used for the animation.. (minus the image map)  Keyframes are in the transform shaders and colour adjust shader

[Oshyan]

Not bad Ben, you've got a great start on some more complex, realistic motion. When I did my original tests I only animated the horizontal motion and along Y to get "morphing". The results were surprisingly good (IMHO ), but you're certainly improving on that. I do think things could be sped up a bit in the horizontal as it's a bit ponderous at the moment, and the clouds also seem to be a bit dark given the rest of the scene. Otherwise this is shaping up very nicely.

Edit: here's my earlier test at low quality, done before the Tech Preview was out (so on an earlier version of TG2):
http://www.oshyan.com/tmp/camera-pan-down_20sec_HQ-xvid1500.avi

- Oshyan

[bigben]

Thanks Oshyan.  I was a little afraid that moving the clouds too much would detract from the effect, but looking at your animation it works well on fast clouds as well.

The full animation is up now at the same URL.  http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/cloud_test2.avi 3.8Mb

Now that I can see the whole animation together I think I should have left the distribution mask static until about 1/3 of the way through the animation to let the clouds start to build up first. The transition gets partly obscured by the simultaneous increase of the cloud density.

I'll make those changes in my next test which will be down from the ground near Lake Jackson (preliminary render is still going). I need to fix up my lakebed and water masking first, but then I'll add a cirrus cloud layer at lake level with a down-sized fractal to try and simulate rising mist. It'll take a bit longer to render though as I've added a tree population for scale (and this time I *know* how big the trees are)

I've added a keyframe selector to my animation database now, so I'll run a progressive render next time (every 32^nd frame, then 16^th etc....)  I'm too impatient

[Oshyan]

Sounds good Ben. I do think faster motion can work very well. Most of the time-lapse stuff of clouds that you see is fairly fast.

I always thought the progressive rendering trick was pretty cool btw.

- Oshyan

[bigben]

I always thought the progressive rendering trick was pretty cool btw.

This is proving to be quite easy to with TG2. The more tests I do, the more it looks like I'll be doing most of my animation with a single TGD and using my database to control the variables, exporting frame data to import into the TGD. Linking the variables to an input file would make life a lot easier.

To make previewing progressive renders easier I renumber the frame renders using the -o option, making it easier to compile the intermediate version (Virtualdub only appends successive numbered frames), and then export a .bat file to rename them for the next stage.

[RealUser]

@bigben @oshyan: Great anims guys! Lovely cloude moves, especially the clouds between the mountains are gorgeous!