My Golden Forest

Started by Valentina, July 28, 2018, 04:49:36 PM

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Valentina

#15
Hi, thank you all. I've added god rays in comp with a pass from terragen.. I don't have the pro version, so I created the pass by hand.. Maybe rays aren't many, and much visible, but I think they add something to the render. Still rendering, though !

edit, here it is. What do you think?


WAS

Have you played with the edge sharpness of your haze to catch light?


Dune


Agura Nata

"Live and Learn!"

Valentina

Thank you, I'm very happy you like it  :)
WASasquatch, the edge sharpness of my light fog layer is 1, and the sharpness of the second layer (the one in the foreground) is 0,5. I like how sunbeams are right now, but I definitely can play more with those values since they will only affect the pass and not the overall effect of the render (since I prefer to deal with volumetric light in comp).

archonforest

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bobbystahr

Full marks on this, well done on the revisions!
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Hannes


Oshyan

Edge Sharpness is not going to affect your beam strength or sharpness much, I think. The "edge" being referred to there is the way the edges of the cloud itself are handled. Beams are not "edges" of the cloud, but rather, areas of light and shadow contrasting with each other.

Just to be sure, you do have "Receive Shadows from Surfaces" enabled in both your cloud layer(s) and your atmosphere, right?

- Oshyan

WAS

#25
Quote from: Oshyan on August 01, 2018, 05:10:28 PM
Edge Sharpness is not going to affect your beam strength or sharpness much, I think. The "edge" being referred to there is the way the edges of the cloud itself are handled. Beams are not "edges" of the cloud, but rather, areas of light and shadow contrasting with each other.

Just to be sure, you do have "Receive Shadows from Surfaces" enabled in both your cloud layer(s) and your atmosphere, right?

- Oshyan

Are you sure? All the god rays tutorials I've looked up specifically note to increase edge sharpness, for example to 10.

You'd think, just like you said, it effects the edges, which receive silver lining. However, when it's a haze, those edges are fuzzy throughout the clouds (especially with no density input or solid noise). I can't imagine the cloud system just simply "disables" edges in it's algorithm just because the noise is hazy and density low.

This would be something cool to have fully investigated for documentation because there seems to be a lot of misconception when using tutorials and than talking about said use in the forums. Lol

For example in my water scenes playing with the shadow maps, increasing the edge sharpness from usual 10 to 200 (cause I had receive shadows disabled) seamed to increase the mount of "streaking" within godrays which may it appear there was more detail in the shadow rays than when lowered to 10. Maybe I'm mistaken

Valentina

#26
Hi Oshyan, yes they are checked. My fog sharpness now is 1. With 5 as value, I get really brighter beams, while it doesn't change much from 5 to 20. And it affects mainly brightness, since I can see much more the difference between light and shadow. I think I couldn't be able to explain me well . Quality of the beams is mostly matters of quality render, I've made some test, but we are talking of really long render times.  I've learned about godrays and volumetric effects in Maya, here workflow is really different.. I'm afraid I misunderstood WASasquatch, probably I didn't understand what he meant   :(

edit: now it's becoming difficult for me to follow you in english, however, these that follow are some of the tests I've made: on the left sharpness 1, on the right 5 (5 and 20 were almost the same).
[attach=1]
here is: sharpness 20, density 0.006 and high high quality
[attach=2]

WAS

It seems to be as I thought. It plays a role in the brightness of capture light, which defines gograys better, as the shadows (actual bits making the god rays) don't receive this gradienting brightness. The brightness is probably coming from the silver lining effect like I assumed from original tutorials. 

Valentina

Here are some tests.. I can't really see differences between 20 of sharpness and 20.. just light seems to spread much in the 200 sharpness one (I can see less blue of the sky), but only if you switch from one picture to another. Probably I would see more difference with higher resolution
[attach=1]

WAS

#29
Quote from: Valentina on August 01, 2018, 07:28:31 PM
Here are some tests.. I can't really see differences between 20 of sharpness and 20.. just light seems to spread much in the 200 sharpness one (I can see less blue of the sky), but only if you switch from one picture to another. Probably I would see more difference with higher resolution
[attach=1]

Hard to really tell, but sorta looks like the shadows are a tad clearer in the 200 sharpness one (which could be a trick from brightness in highlights being tad stronger). You could try taking the two images and overlay them in Photoshop with the Difference layer, which will show pixels that are different between the two renders.