Lakeside + 720p Animation on page 2

[Oshyan]

Righteo, I'll mess with it a bit, but not too much.

- Oshyan

[Matt]

Cool. The exposure is just default settings in the file, the .exr output was very close to blown-out in the sky, I used some pretty extreme internal scatter lighting(6) and higher than normal propagation mix(0.25) so I didn't think I should raise the exposure and lose any detail.
I like to have a darkish cloud colour with lots of fake internal scatter lighting, this leaves the shadow areas nice and contrasty while keeping the whole thing nice and bright. I know those settings pretty far from physically 'correct' but it's a good way to have nice detail in the shadows/edges of fractal features and also in the brighter parts of a cloud at the same time. Raising the ambient colour is a good cloud control too but not this time, as I wanted the contrast. Actual 'scattering colour' has no effect on my version(as I used no GI) so you might have a play with that area too when you enable the envirolight.

The whole cloud has a sort of defocused appearance to me. I think this is because the edges are quite soft. The high fake internal scattering gives the impression of bigger clouds that should have sharper edges, and this might be exaggerating the impression of everything being out of focus.

I would bring the fake internal scattering value back down and then increase the edge sharpness (or density) until you get the level of lighting you like.

Overall shapes are pretty good though.

Matt

[dandelO]

I think the edge sharpness was 35 and density was 0.01... 2 secs, I wrote the settings down elsewhere for someone...

Main tab; Depth=2000, localised=3000m radius, value at radius=-0.25, edge sharpness=35, density=0.01,
Colour tab; colour=0.25
Lighting tab; Glow=1, glow power=2, light propagation mix=0.25, fake internal scattering=6.
Tweaks tab; Flatter base, base softness=0.325.

The actual noise fractal was pretty much default cloud fractal settings, changed to billows, noise variation = 0 and colour contrast = 2.
I think I slightly lowered the colour roughness to 1.25 but that's all I changed there, except for minor adjusting of the the warp amount. Scales were default.

I was pushing the boat out with samples as it was on this computer, I went as high as 50 for sharpness when messing around but eventually reset that back to 35 to save some cpu effort!

Cheers, I'll keep your advice in mind, though!

[Matt]

The main thing is the high value for fake internal scattering. What I mean is that I think it will look better with a much lower value, combined with an even higher density and/or edge sharpness on the clouds which will brighten up the clouds again to where they were when you had the high scattering value.

But yes, higher density or edge sharpness will probably increase the render times.

This might be a situation where you can use "step optimisation". Try a value of 2 or 3. I would usually only try it on very dense clouds like this.

Matt

[dandelO]

I animated the clouds, water and camera and sent the file to Oshyan, who thankyouverymuchly rendered it at 1280x720p.

I've s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d it out as far as I dare to and you can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/QKtdyFvm4e4

Best fullscreen!

Cheers!

[dandelO]

Going to try and upload a version that's not so compressed. The clouds are very muddy on Youtube. I'll switch the links once I've done.

[Kadri]

Nice animation Martin. Especially the foreground looks real 

[dandelO]

Cheers, Kadri.

Better quality version on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/dandelo/smoothinterlude720p

[Tangled-Universe]

Hmmm...I think I agree with Matt. With cumulus like these I use settings like these quite often:

- cloud diffuse colour = 0.3-0.4 and scattering colour is twice to two-half times higher.
- edge sharpness from 25 to 80 and density = edge sharpness/1000 (so 0.025 to 0.08) (you can also try the other way around)
- glow amount around 1
- light propagation around 2 for starters
- propagation mix around 0.5
- fake internal scattering around 1, mostly I slightly increase it to 1.1 or 1.2, but sometimes also to 0.9-0.8.

It depends a bit on the lighting how these settings eventually work out. For clouds like these I would always avoid to have the sun behind the clouds.
Mostly something +/- 100 degrees from the camera works best.

The glow is still a mystery to me. Try setting them both to 0 and you'll still see strong burns in your EXR output.
Getting the scattering curve right is uber-tricky.

Another trick is to increase ambient colour a bit in the clouds which brightens up shadows but also the clouds themselves.
Then together with the scattering and cloud colour settings you can achieve interesting looks.

You probably know most if not all of these things, but I thought I'd share them for the ones interested to read.

Cheers,
Martin

[dandelO]

Thanks, Martin. Interesting idea to try to keep density=sharpness/1000, I'll play with that at some point.
I totally bypassed the scattering colour here as there is no GI present for speed so, in this instance at least, it's not applicable but I do always use a higher colour here when it has any effect.
The light propagation mix setting is something I often overlook but here I think I doubled it to 0.25 for a good deal more brightness than default. I certainly know about the fussing with glow amount in clouds and the ambient setting is very good to use when you're like me and constantly trying to avoid excessive GI render time!
Cheers, man!

[Tangled-Universe]

I'm not sure what you mean with the ambient setting in relation to GI?
It's another way to adjust/alter the darkness of the clouds and shadows.
With GI at high settings the shadows won't be really brighter, only more detailed. Upping ambient makes shadow brighter, but rather reduces detail in general.
So if you'd ask me it's not of much use when you're going for low GI solutions. I only use it to balance things a bit further, if necessary.

If you like I can give your clouds a shot to get the lighting ironed out a bit.
Knowing Oshyan rendered it it also surprised me that this isn't rendered with GI.
For nice clouds, GI is critical/essential.

[Oshyan]

I just didn't have the time to adjust settings to account for GI, and it had already been tuned to at least look decent without the GI.

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

Martin, if I don't use GI for a project, I find I can assimilate a decently lit cloud with combinations of the many different colour/lighting options in the cloud layer, ambient colour being one of them.
I think 'nice' is subject to viewer discretion, I've seen many nice looking TG clouds without GI.
That isn't to say that I wouldn't rather be able to go that extra mile to render with a more regular lighting setup but on my only working machine at the moment, I'm not always able to.