cloudy question

[jlsarnicola]

Cloudy fun time,  anyone know a way to decrease the graininess of the clouds i pumped up the voxels to 120 million would more help?

[Matt]

I'm guessing that the anti-aliasing is at a low value. Increasing anti-aliasing should usually fix it. But another way to reduce this noise is to go into GI Settings and increase "Voxel scattering quality" on the "GI in Clouds" tab. For scenes that only have clouds the default of 100 may be a bit too low. You might try 200-300 for scenes like this.

[WAS]

You may be interested in my default project.

It has basic setups for standard, defer all, and path tracing. I use a Voxel scattering quality of 150 with AA7 in Standard Render for example.

[Tangled-Universe]

Sweet clouds!
Did you try different density settings for your clouds? They lack a bit of scattering in the shadow areas. I'd expect some light to penetrate into those areas, but they are quite dark still.

I don't know your AA setting, but like Matt said it's pretty important.
Increasing voxel scatter quality may give you better results with lower render cost compared to increasing AA.

I'm with WAS on generating your own default setup, I have done that too, but with different choices.
What you choose depends on how you work. For instance, my default setup contains a plane instead of a planet.

[Oshyan]

Also just to directly address the voxel count issue, the number of voxels does not particularly affect the level of *noise*. It is more about the detail of the clouds and especially the cloud shading. Noise is generally a result of undersampling, i.e. too few samples of the cloud shading to get a clean result. The number of overall samples is adjusted by the AA value when Defer Atmo or Defer All are enabled. For scattered light in v3 clouds (e.g. "Easy Clouds"), the Voxel Scatter Quality also has a large effect, as others have noted.

- Oshyan

[jlsarnicola]

Thanks all for the feedback bi still need to set aside some time to trying different settings. 

[WAS]

Also if you haven't already checked, your default v3 clouds will come with a quality level of .25 (25% sorta). I often increase this to 0.5 or higher.

Easy Cloud have this already set to 0.5 and out of the box, resulting in nicer clouds in fidelity.

This maybe should be the default setting for v3 as well, as AA can really take care of the "previewing" when lowering it. Quality impacts a little too much of the clouds for good low-fidelity judgement imo.  I do notice a lot of cloud questions initially come in quality based form. This may help with that. What do you think @Oshyan or @Matt ?

[Tangled-Universe]

What I like about the 0.25 for quality is that my preview is still fast and responsive.
It also still gives a good idea about your cloud shapes and effect on lighting. I don't need 0.5 for that.

I guess if we start changing default quality settings for elements to be closer to what generally gives better results sounds great, sensible and helpful for beginners at first, but will slow down workflow I'm afraid.
For instance, soft shadows are also not enabled by default, should we do that too? No it will make things slower in preview and in test renders.
I don't think so as long as the design process of TG is still heavily dependent on 3D preview interaction.
That should be as fast as possible with most realistic/optimal balance in performance and accuracy. The 3D preview is still the bottleneck for workflow speed.

[Hannes]

I agree, Martin.

[Oshyan]

Cloud Quality often most affects the level of noise. For RTP the results are not that dramatic. One possible solution to the dual needs here - improved default cloud quality (lower noise) vs. fast preview speed - may be to simply cap cloud quality at 0.25 for RTP. I just tested it with a single 2000m deep Easy Cloud and the shading differences are minor from 0.25 to 1.0 in RTP, but in render it's noticeably less noisy at Quality 1. Obviously in some cases the differences can be bigger, but honestly I think there are *other* compromises in RTP that have a bigger negative impact on accuracy already, so I'd rather cap Quality at 0.25 (if it's possible) and perhaps improve the other RTP shortcuts that already more dramatically impact shading accuracy vs. renders.

As for Soft Shadows, it does make a performance difference in RTP so perhaps shouldn't be enabled by default. But the default of 9 samples could be reduced to 2 with little ill effect, and it previews much faster (though still slower than non-soft shadows of course). Another option would be to have Soft Shadows enabled by default for renders, but only preview it in RTP when path tracing/full lighting is enabled...

- Oshyan

[jlsarnicola]

Well im still playing around with settings the following pic has High voxel count 160 and high scatter in GI. still playing around with it but im liking the results.