Nebulae

Started by Denis Sirenko, July 26, 2017, 07:40:59 AM

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Nacer Eddine


WAS

#181
Quote from: Denis Sirenko on April 04, 2018, 04:25:34 AM
Sorry, but this is also a nebula :))

[attachimg=1]

I'm still trying to figure out how you do those fine rough details in the cloud forms, and the large twists without creating flat looking swirls with warp.

Added a recent test render... (these take anywhere from 10-30 minutes to render, not sure what creates the varying times between seeds and minor adjustments. I guess cloud mixing)

Nacer Eddine

Full HD



i can make it 4K or 8K as i want, of couse with AE in just few minutes.

Matt

Quote from: Nacer Eddine on April 04, 2018, 07:53:51 PM
i can make it 4K or 8K as i want, of couse with AE in just few minutes.

But Denis's nebulae are absolutely beautiful and I have not seen better in any software. It's bad etiquette to do this to Denis's thread, unless you are asking for help on how to do this in Terragen or you genuinely have advice that can help Denis to make his work look better. I'm sorry to have to tell you that I don't think you do.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

Quote from: Denis Sirenko on April 04, 2018, 04:25:34 AM
Sorry, but this is also a nebula :))

[attachimg=1]

I hardly ever say this, but I would love to have this as a print! Can we help you to render it at a higher resolution?

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

luvsmuzik

I have watched and read this thread from the start. Excellent work throughout. Is it now your goal to do these nebulae entirely in Terragen with no Photoshop elements?
Beautiful images regardless.

WAS

#186
Quote from: Matt on April 04, 2018, 08:42:01 PM
Quote from: Denis Sirenko on April 04, 2018, 04:25:34 AM
Sorry, but this is also a nebula :))

[attachimg=1]

I hardly ever say this, but I would love to have this as a print! Can we help you to render it at a higher resolution?

Matt

Man I would love to see these at high resolution and get in close to those nebulas. I'm addicted. I call them Sirenko Nebula after the creator. Been playing non-stop with his original share. Created a few from scratch. Just trying to unlock his masterful warps.

Quote from: luvsmuzik on April 04, 2018, 11:30:22 PM
I have watched and read this thread from the start. Excellent work throughout. Is it now your goal to do these nebulae entirely in Terragen with no Photoshop elements?
Beautiful images regardless.

That's what I've wanted to do, but so far, unfortunately, lighting is very manual, and does in fact take time to get the "right positions" and sometimes you end up changing good things (in my case). I'd love a way to procedurally add light sources. Doing them manually to the point you have a star system may not be poss--wait... the PF star background... How did I forget? That would at least get your ambient stars out of the way.

Night Sky Toggle v3 for reference

Note: The PF background idea will not work without illumination on the background. I'm sure this could be done with a huuge spotlight but I haven't attempted.

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: Nacer Eddine on April 02, 2018, 08:43:14 PM
I did some experiments in after effects
with fractal noise and volumetric light effects
just to have an idea , look what can be exploited
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aITHTS_LY5o

Nacer, on the one hand, I see that the animation was created quickly and looks complicated. On the other hand, I can understand what mechanisms here were used without the use of 3D-technologies, only due to 2D-technologies. As far as I understand the ideology of After Effects - in the first place it is a 2D program, in which there are no serious possibilities for working with volumetric light. As imitation of 3D phenomena and processes is an excellent option and can be used for many tasks. However, I would like to get the most reliable image, with a real play of light and shadow on the volumes, taking into account the re-reflections, changing the lighting passing through the thickness of particles and so on. I still do not see an opportunity to achieve my goals with After Effects, because I do not have a goal to get a video, but I need a static and quite realistic picture.

Quote from: Nacer Eddine on April 04, 2018, 07:53:51 PM
Full HD
...
i can make it 4K or 8K as i want, of couse with AE in just few minutes.

The nebula is not as chaotic and complex as you pictured. It contains not only radiating components, but also absorbing, reflecting, and even re-re-re-reflecting (astronomers are now developing a technology that will allow to reconstruct the events that took place 10, 100, 1000... of years along the paths of light rays that are reflected in different parts of the nebula backward). The nebula can be seen as a landscape in 3D. There is no bottom or top, but there is a land, sky, trees and Sun. Many Suns! Look, what a beauty:

Carina nebula:

[attachimg=1]

NGC 6357:

[attachimg=2]

Orion nebula:

[attachimg=3]

After effects can not construct the nebula from its components, keep the dependencies between them when switching the seeds and rotate the camera 180 degrees and look from the back while preserving the entire structure. This is the territory of 3D-graphics.

But After Effects is faster and more artistic than TG can do animation of some processes, and also add some good effects. With this I will not argue. But in my opinion, it is better to consider it as an addition to TG, and not as an alternative.

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: Oshyan on April 02, 2018, 03:02:43 PM
Your method may not be the fastest, but the results speak for themselves. Absolutely gorgeous and realistic!

Oshyan, thank you. May I ask what alternative method(s) did you mean (obviously more productive, but less realistic)?

Oshyan

Denis, I was referring to methods like After Effects, and other software that produces faster but poorer-looking results. As you yourself explained very well, they are not doing true volumetric (3D) calculations, shadows, etc. Realistic effects are much more time-consuming to create (from a rendering perspective, if not a creative/editing perspective). This is true even with proper, volumetric cloud simulation. It can take days to calculate a complex fluid simulation of something like a high detail volcanic plume, and then days more to render it with realistic volumetric light interaction in an animation. These are just complex problems.

I think your methods are very good for producing the realistic and beautiful results that you are aiming for. Some people don't seem as interested in realism or aesthetic, just in the fastest way to visualize an idea, and I guess that's valid too, for some purposes. But I for one appreciate realism and the beauty of these images you're creating. In fact, although I had seen some nebula in Terragen before which I considered to be realistic, you have "raised the bar" and shown me even more amazing nebula than I thought possible in Terragen. If it was something we could do in a single rendering pass, without Photoshop, I would want to animate it. :)

- Oshyan

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: WASasquatch on April 03, 2018, 12:10:31 AM
Started playing around with the scene you originally shared. While doing so I accidently plugged in the wrong nodes to a warp and surface layer (meant for a mask) and created a very interesting motion effect. Refined it down to three nodes and re-rendered and got this.

I just used piped in my cloud into a merge shader, with the A Input scaled to 0.9 - 0.9 - 0.9, and than another warp shader warped by the master warper already applied to the original shape that was duplicated and scaled and merged.

An interesting effect. However, with close study it is clear that the nebula is double. For me, this can be a problem :) But in some cases, for example, when the details of the nebula do not have clear boundaries, this may well be useful.

In fact, I have an unresolved problem related to the imitation of the movement of the nebula due to the explosion: at me with equal speed, both the rarefied and dense parts of the nebula are scattered. Look at this photo of a crab nebula:

[attachimg=1]

[attachimg=2]

It is clearly seen that dense clumps scatter with a lag, slower than more sparse areas. Thus, a long tail is propagated along the direction of propagation of the shock wave. So far I have not achieved this effect.

Quote from: Hannes on April 03, 2018, 01:19:20 AM
Holy moly, Denis, that looks so incredibly cool!!!!

Thanks, Hannes)

Quote from: WASasquatch on April 04, 2018, 02:59:14 PM
I'm still trying to figure out how you do those fine rough details in the cloud forms and the large twists without creating flat looking swirls with warp.

I'm not sure I understand the question. On the attached picture there is an example of "flat looking swirls", of which you speak?
Just in case, I will say that I use different warpers with different settings for large, medium and small scales. Therefore, the results of their work are not interrelated. And now I'm working in a completely new scene, and not in the scene that I posted last year.

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: luvsmuzik on April 04, 2018, 11:30:22 PM
I have watched and read this thread from the start. Excellent work throughout. Is it now your goal to do these nebulae entirely in Terragen with no Photoshop elements?
Beautiful images regardless.

Thank you, luvsmuzik. Exactly. I need to draw almost 100 nebulae for the game. I'll go crazy if I do not get rid of the routine. The only thing that I will continue to do in Photoshop: the composition, the addition of stars and distant galaxies. There is another question with how I will paint nebulae. I have not decided yet. Initially, I wanted to create renderers with channels for painting, that is, the nebula is colored in conditional red, green and blue colors, so that later in photoshop on these channels I can start any others that I want. Now I see that even the conditional colors look interesting, and the nebula with algae (the last one published), which I painted completely in TG, demonstrated that the TG can handle it on its own.

Quote from: WASasquatch on April 05, 2018, 02:04:30 AM
That's what I've wanted to do, but so far, unfortunately, lighting is very manual, and does in fact take time to get the "right positions" and sometimes you end up changing good things (in my case). I'd love a way to procedurally add light sources. Doing them manually to the point you have a star system may not be poss--wait... the PF star background... How did I forget? That would at least get your ambient stars out of the way.

Night Sky Toggle v3 for reference

Note: The PF background idea will not work without illumination on the background. I'm sure this could be done with a huuge spotlight but I haven't attempted.

Thanks for the link! This is what I was looking for and I really needed ... six months ago)) After an unsuccessful search, I realized my procedural generation of stars in Photoshop and I'm going to use them. And yet thanks for the help.

As for the manual placement of the stars: but in fact nobody manually places them in space! I abandoned the idea of placing stars manually and they are hanging in my place now always in the same place.

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: Matt on April 04, 2018, 08:42:01 PM
Quote from: Denis Sirenko on April 04, 2018, 04:25:34 AM
Sorry, but this is also a nebula :))

[attachimg=1]

I hardly ever say this, but I would love to have this as a print! Can we help you to render it at a higher resolution?

That would be interesting, thanks for the suggestion! Rendering a file with a size of, for example, 12000x12000 px (1x1 meter) takes at least a week and paralyzes all the work. What is needed for this? Should I send you the original tgd file?

Denis Sirenko

Quote from: Oshyan on April 06, 2018, 06:12:14 PM
If it was something we could do in a single rendering pass, without Photoshop, I would want to animate it. :)

Oshyan, do you really have a separate room with a small supercomputer?)) It would be amazing! Can I ask some questions in the mail or will we discuss the process here?

Photoshop I now use only to change the total exposure and there for a slight correction of the exposure near the stars, but for a specific seed, we can simply make the star darker or brighter.

WAS

Quote from: Denis Sirenko on April 06, 2018, 06:29:12 PM
As for the manual placement of the stars: but in fact nobody manually places them in space! I abandoned the idea of placing stars manually and they are hanging in my place now always in the same place.

That's really surprising! I might actually try this approach and just work around the light! I never thought about that. I was too busy seeing dense spots, or bare spots in my clouds and wanting to move my lights around them to see the lighting effects. Thanks for that.

As for the variations in total cloud forms in repetition similar to the Crab Nebula, I would imagine your original shared idea of using a base density fractal, and than separate warping passes and fractalization would create the variation needed. Especially a final large warp for those "lag" features if the the fractal warp shader with roughness turned down a bit doesn't create it. I'm actually working on a project with similar uses in order to create variance, but be on "track" with the whole form, while using the original form for each new element. It also also adjustments to all passes (cloud nodes) a bit easier without having to look into multiple density shaders.



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