Nebulae (now with animation)

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

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Dune

Talking about scale; render times are longer if scales of clouds are high, simply said. So if there's nothing to relate size to, why not decrease everything tenfold (or hundredfold)? Is that a viable option? 

Dune

I have just been experimenting a few minutes and found that you can easily make another planet (or more) encircling earth, make some huge populations of rocks (or spheres) spread over huge areas, with huge distances between instances, and sit them on those heavily displaced terrains on those encircling planets, while unchecking render atmo and terrain of course. You end up with a sky filled with rocks/spheres at various distances from earth's terrain. You can displace the rocks or make them into stars by using a luminant default shader or surface shader.

Hannes

#17
@TheBadger:
I think we shouldn't relate to much on real world scale. I'm not sure if we could see anything of the nebula even if we were right inside it. It's probably far too big. Not talking about the speed a spaceship needs to fly through such kind of nebulae. Even with light speed it would most likely be a very slow travel!
It's just an effect... By the way, I don't know if I you may have got me wrong regarding 3ds Max. I only created the starfield as an object in Max and exported it as .obj, imported it into TG and converted it to a .tgo. The render is pure TG.

@Dune:
Yes, size matters of course ;D
Seriously, I don't know if I could change the scale settings of the clouds without changing the whole shapes, with which I'm very happy now. Maybe I'll check that out, when the animation is done. 2015 maybe... ;)
The population and rock solution is a very clever idea. I first thought about using tiny little clouds when I started this thing, since someone had done this before. But I was too impatient to make hundreds of tests with some other cloud layers and chose to import this starfield object (which was made in less than a minute). I'm not that much of a purist, who says everything has to be done in TG. In my opinion it's the final result that counts.
Something else, I'd like to share the starfield object, but even with WinRar I can't get it any smaller than 900KB...

(Frame 24 has just started to render. Rendertime actually 46 hours!)

TheBadger

@ Hannes and Dune.

Ok, you guys are right. Real world scale now sounds rather silly after thinking about it. Even if the software and my system could do it does sound pointless to try something like that.

Really my main concern is realistically representing the distances from one object to another. If the camera is closely moving past a planet with a nebulae in the background, visually, the background will move only so much (to the eye) relative to the foreground as determined by size and distance. But if the planet is real world scale and the nebulae is smaller than the planet in real world scale, you can see that there would be visual problems, depending on how far the planet is from the nebulae. I see now why Kardi thought compositing and other means would be easier.

I am not a TG2 purist lol :D I just don't have much practice with other 3D software. So the more that can be done in TG2 the better, for now.

@Hannes
I really want to see your animation now! I think just seeing it would answer most of my questions. How long did you say, 5 years :P ;)
It has been eaten.

Hannes

@TheBadger:
I want to see it too! ;D
Anyway we have to be patient.
69 hours rendering now. Actually frame 35. Maybe a little less than five years. Let's be optimistic!

Hannes

Finally here is a 139 frame animation of this. I decided to stop rendering here and move to other projects.
http://vimeo.com/40416706

Oshyan

That's pretty amazing Hannes! Hard to believe it was done with TG2. Were you raytracing the atmosphere?

- Oshyan

Hannes

No, I didn't. It's just some cloud layers and a lot of coloured lightsources. And of course the stars model.

Dune

Cool, Hannes! Must have been hard to place all lights and move around to position them well. How many are there?

Hannes

Eleven, and yes it was painful!!

Kadri

#25

Hannes there are some small problems but i didn't expected this so to speak :)
I think it looks great! There is much potential.

dandelO

Very good, Hannes! I get frustrated at those popping artefacts when animating stars and things. Great job!

j meyer


cyphyr

Impressive !
I'd be interested to know your system spec and render times (the one in useless without the other)
Cheers
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
/|\

Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Hannes

Thank you, guys. I have to say that I like it too but I'm not entirely happy with the quality of the renders (popping stars, flickering lights and the planets look a little bit like milk drops...).
Cyphyr, I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ with 3 GHz RAM, not the most powerful machine, so it took two hours per frame to render.
Btw Dune, I just saw that there are only nine light sources including a sunlight.

Instead of explaining things I decided to put the scene (without the stars - the model is too large for the forum) into the file sharing section, so you can explore it yourself.