Nebulae (now with animation)

Started by Hannes, March 15, 2012, 06:47:56 AM

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Hannes

I had a look at some Hubble images and wondered if TG would be capable of creating some nice nebulae. I disabled primary in the athmosphere tab and GI as well, played around with the clouds and additional lights (the sunlight isn't really needed here) and added the stars. It's some instances of a real 3D model made by a meshed particle system out of 3ds max. So it's possible to fly through. Rendertimes are quite high so I'll see how far this goes. The flares are postwork of course and the contrast is a little bit increased.

Jack

Really interesting work here mate:)
love the colours and cloud structures
My terragen gallery:
http://wetbanana.deviantart.com/

cyphyr

Looking really interesting, keep on going.
I was working on something similar a few weeks back, your way ahead of where I got to.
Cheers
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

inkydigit

these are looking spectacular indeed...please keep going!
:)

Henry Blewer

Very good looking. This is much better than many attempts I have seen on television shows.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

efflux

This is an interesting idea and it's a practical use of TG2 that could be ultised for movies.

RichTwo

#6

My thoughts are maybe it's possible if you take a few cloud layers of different colors, make them immense in size and raise their altitude to astronomical heights.  It'd take a good deal of finagling will all kinds of settings to get the desired effect, I'm sure.  Then backlight with several sunlight sources.  I did a quick test with cumulus cloud altitude at 3e+006 just to see if that much worked, and TG2 didn't have a problem with it.  You'd certainly need to postwork in the stars and lens flares, though.

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, and it may not work the way you want it to.  But it's just an idea.  I remember someone once posted a thread here - in File Sharing, maybe where the nebula effect was a colored power fractal connected to the background shader.  And I know it's possible connecting an image map shader.

Edit: - oops - my bad.  I didn't read it carefully enough.  It's the stars that were made with 3ds Max.  Never mind!
They're all wasted!

elipsis1

This is a great looking image.

So these gasses where clouds from TG2? or were they from 3dsMax as well?

If I read it right, you say the clouds are TG2.

Anyway, I love it :)

Hannes

#8
Thank you guys. The stars are some instances of an object imported from 3ds max (a particle system with a lot of spheres converted to a mesh) and rendered together with the rest in TG. The lens flares are postwork, but the nebulae are pure TG.

Hannes

By the way, right now I am rendering an animation of this. 200 frames. 800X450px. Rendertime per frame two hours. See you next year! :(

TheBadger

Quote from: Hannes on March 15, 2012, 07:03:53 PM
By the way, right now I am rendering an animation of this. 200 frames. 800X450px. Rendertime per frame two hours. See you next year! :(

lol, render times like that don't scare me anymore, I now live in that hell indefinitely.

I'm glad you are doing this hannes! I recently did a search in the forum for nebula, and found some nice stuff. But it looked like everyone got to a certain point and then just quit on it.

Do you have any of the test renders from earlier stages you can post? I would like to see more from this.
It has been eaten.

Hannes

OK, here is one of the first attempts. Far away from what I had in mind!

Kadri

#12

Nice nebulae Hannes !
The render times are mostly too long for this kind of things.
I always thought why they mostly do 2D kind of composite images and especially animation.
After one or two tries it makes sense.
Animations made slower then with i7'ns do not make much fun probably.
Excluding some of the masochistic members we have here around  :D

I am curious about your animation Hannes :)

nbk2


TheBadger

Hannes

Hi, you know, I like the wip too. I think this is a very interesting project!
There are a lot of difficult problems you will have to figure out to make it work, but it looks like you will do it.

Take a look at this animation: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/13/video/a/
Its pretty simple as far as the 3D world goes. And I think your image is far more aesthetically pleasing. But just think about the camera movement in the video in relation to your nebula. DandelO was doing some experiments recently that I think relate to what you are doing: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=14068.0
I bet one or both of you could figure out how to make this work in TG2 alone. That is, I think that it would be great if it could all be done in  TG without having to go to another software. Do you think its possible? What made you use 3DMAX, was is necessary, or just faster?

The scale is a big issue. How big is a nebula relative to a single world, and to a solar system (in general terms)
What kind of file size are we talking about if we want to fly a camera through a nebula (at scale), and land it on a planet? Is it possible?!
It has been eaten.