"Cumulonimbus and Anvil" Revisited - Final page 2

[gregtee]

Yeah, I was messing with that this evening and found finding the right values frustrating to say the least.  Here's an idea maybe worth considering for the dev team.

There's a feature in Nuke's Z-defocus node that allows the user to see where the near and far focal planes are by way of a three color rack.  Parts of the image that are in front of the focal plane are say green, and parts of the image that in the focal plane are red, and parts that are beyond the focal plane are blue. 

This allows the compositor to quickly see what's where depth of field wise without having to guess or do a bunch of renders.  Could something like this work in TG?  Say everything beyond the far distance cutoff is one color, and everything in from of it is another right in the interface, visible without having to actually do a test render.   

[Tangled-Universe]

The distance shader is a "remnant" of the TG-versions which didn't have "localized cloud" layers back then.

So I'd now check the radius of the distance shader, say 10000m, delete it and enable "localize cloud" in the cloud node and give it a similar radius (which by default happens to be 10000m)

You'll now see a circular boundary box with 2 dashed circles which represent cloud bottom and top.
You can see that change when you adjust cloud altitude and/or cloud depth.

This boundary box you can select and move in the 3D preview. Very useful

Another advantage of using localized cloud layers is that you'll restrict the renderer from testing the entire density fractals texture space of where the distance shader is blending it.
By using a localized cloud layer the renderer knows in advance that it only has to calculate the density shader in the localized layer itself, thus potentially speeding up rendering.

Another small tip/trick I'd like to share:
Inmediately enable "move textures with cloud" in the cloud node as soon as you start working with a cloud.
If you have a nice cloud setup, but would like to move it and choose to enable "move textures with clouds" then, then the density fractal will move to it's relative position of the localized cloud layer and thus your nice cloud setup won't look the same anymore. Totally different actually.
So starting with "move textures with cloud" from the beginning will guarantee you that you can move your cloud anywhere at a later stage and also allows you to save the cloud as a clipfile and import it 1:1 into other projects

Sorry for the little hijack Frank

Cheers,
Martin

[FrankB]

Sorry for the little hijack Frank

No problem, Martin.

In fact, I have reworked the scene to use localized clouds. Good tip about "move textures with cloud", though!

[FrankB]

Looks great Frank. A little noisy, but I know this isn't final render quality. And an impressive render time at that resolution, it must be a nicely tuned scene already. Perhaps an animation is indeed possible...

- Oshyan

Thanks Osyhan! I'll do a final render once I have worked on the foreground a bit more.
About the animation: It would be possible... if you would offer to pay the render farm, that is ;-)
But in general, I think a still is best for that scene. There is nothing much to animate in this scene, other than time lapsing the cloud build-up.

Cheers,
Frank

[TheBadger]

beautiful

[FrankB]

Thank you, Michael!   

[FrankB]

and here is the final

[inkydigit]

stonking result Frank!

[gregtee]

Awesome!

[Tangled-Universe]

Frikkin awesome Frank

[Hannes]

Wow!!!!

[yossam]

Fantastic 

[Jo Kariboo]

Very big and beautifull !!!

[choronr]

The King Kong of the sky ...beeeautiful!

[TerrMite]

Looks fantastic Frank,

Love both cloudscapes.

Thanks to T-U for the tip about "move texture". Good advice.

Cheers