Northern Lights

[cyphyr]

Well I my recent diversion into Voronoi cloud studies sparked an idea so I just had to give it a wirl

The aurora are a modified version of my Sunrise tgc, vastly simplified in terms of scale and octaves and the sky, moon and lake reflection were done in post.

As always c & c very welcome.

Enjoy

Richard

[rcallicotte]

It's a start.  Looks like a smudge right now.  Maybe you could try adding some other functions.  Someone uploaded some curve functions here not long ago.

[ProjectX]

great start there! Could do with adding some more colours to it, but it looks fantastic already

[old_blaggard]

Our good old Terrade over at Ashundar came up with some pretty convincing Aurora effects a few weeks ago: http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-4394
The trick is to stretch the noise in the y-direction.

[cyphyr]

I think I got the scale wrong on the Aurora, I wouldn't say they were smudgy, maybe the reverse however. I've upped the scale to loose some of the repetition and added a couple of extra layers with a little offset to give it some more colour. I don't know if its too dark or not, I think its ok as is but I might up the ambient a tad. I'm working on a tft monitor so I have no idea how it looks on a crt. The Aurora are 3d Cumulus Clouds at 128 samples with aggressive acceleration on them. Even so this is gona be one loong render!
Richard

[cyphyr]

Yep the noise is stretched in the Y I think part of the problem is my memory of the aurora is different from most of the photos I have seen. Most of the photos have been taken with a fairly long exposure and are hence very blurred. My memory (could oh so wrong) is of a very much more defined, sharper effect with the movements and ripples passing across it. Of course this movement is what causes the blurring in the photos. If anyone here lives with these beautiful atmospherice I'd be interested to hear if this is true or just an old blurred memory
Richard

[dhavalmistry]

very nice and creative!!!....


just for you!!....

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070409.html