Quote from: Tangled-Universe on August 12, 2007, 05:30:05 AM
Hi Frank!
Thanks for posting a high-res picture of this. Seems you've only adjusted the colours a little?
It looks very good, adds a little bit more definition. Also nice is that the clouds in the background keep looking good as well.
Sometimes clouds look well at close-up but are ugly when viewing from a distance, or vice versa
I think when it's about making these kind of clouds it's of great importance to find the right balance between the depths, densities and edge sharpnesses of the fractals(?)
Would you like to give a few directions on how these clouds were made?
It's really outstanding work! Are there more attempts coming?
Martin
Hi Martin,
well the first attempt was only a crop render at low quality, the high-res version in turn is only slightly different, but was done in full quality, more GI samples etc.
However, a third attmept of the same scene is currently rendering with less warping. I also felt the internal scattering was a bit too dark, hence the next version is more conservative in this regard.
For these type of clouds, I prefer an edge sharpness less than 1, and a density between 0.01 and 0.03. I usually also up the cloud colour towards more white, lower the default light propagation and enviro light. However, to me, two things are key:
- I use a specific density fractal to serve as a blend shader for the "real" density fractal. The blend shader is almost a black and white mask, and ensures that the clouds are not all over the place and there's more distance between clouds, and some predefined dimensions without comprimising on their size. Simply reducing coverage unfortunately also reduces the size of the clouds, and I don't want that to happen.
- the second most important thing is to save in openexr format, otherwise it becomes impossible to work out all these nice shades of cloud-white. If you had seen the final render image, it didn't look as exciting, only the ability to fine-tune a wider range of exposures brought up all these details.
Cheers,
Frank