Haze Mountain Idea

WAS · February 28, 2020, 12:45:14 PM

Thought I'd share this idea. You can use a surface layer to mask a terrain black, and another set to white, and used as slope restrictions. Then, with the cloud base altitude being 0, using a disp to scalar allows us to push the clouds up right along the surface.

Hannes · February 28, 2020, 01:29:49 PM

That sounds really interesting. Would you mind sharing a TGD to explore?

WAS · February 28, 2020, 02:09:13 PM

That shouldn't be a problem, though I'll remove erosion just for those that don't have it installed.

WAS · February 28, 2020, 02:16:58 PM

Here we are.

Woops I forgot to remove the populations. Updated the files.

bobbystahr · February 28, 2020, 09:20:10 PM

Quote from: WAS on February 28, 2020, 02:16:58 PMHere we are.

Woops I forgot to remove the populations. Updated the files.

thanks...

WAS · February 28, 2020, 10:53:16 PM

Quote from: bobbystahr on February 28, 2020, 09:20:10 PMthanks...

welcome... ?

Hannes · February 29, 2020, 08:19:50 AM

Cool! Thanks for the file, Jordan. Exploring right now.

SILENCER · February 29, 2020, 09:28:04 AM

Great idea, looks great, man.

I never, ever would have thought of this.

Not sure what the render holdup is here, but this example of your scene took 2 hours to brew.
I did, however, swap it over to the path tracer, detail and .6, AA at 4, Erosion enabled.
I raised the light a tad to show the cloud gag.

Great idea

On the second frame (much smaller and faster to render) you can see how the mist hugs the terrain, plus the flow map is taken directly from the erosion plug-in and piped into the texture mask to bring that out

47 minutes with the standard renderer

WAS · February 29, 2020, 11:31:52 AM

47 sounds more about what I had. But I honestly thought you had a better PC than me. I got the 2600 (not 2600+) and so got 37 minutes with SR MPD 0.6 AA7. This was the eroded file though which may render faster in SR due to it being technically a heightmap and more basic geometry than if it was without erosion. But the non erosion file takes about 40 something minutes. I tried throwing this up on my server for a larger render and it's having issues. Doing prepass forever. Should have cached to file. Non erosion file so shouldn't be that.

Also note my PC is currently at 10 threads of 12.

Kadri · February 29, 2020, 11:39:42 AM

Nice setup Jordan. Thanks for sharing.

Hannes · February 29, 2020, 12:14:03 PM

Played around with it, and I have two questions now: what exactly does the black terrain surface do? When I disable it, it seems to look the same.
And have you already tested it with a loaded terrain file? So far I could use your method only with procedural ones.

Dune · February 29, 2020, 12:20:06 PM

I didn't see much difference if using the masks or not. Maybe a more pronounced sample would convince better.

Hannes · February 29, 2020, 01:01:13 PM

The white mask has a lot of impact here, and it seems the white color affects the density of the cloud. You can even use the altitude constraints of it.
If you disable the white mask surface layer, there is still some haze, but a lot less.

Hannes · February 29, 2020, 01:20:01 PM

Tried it again with a heightfield. Doesn't seem to work. In my screenshots you can see the cloudpattern looks the same in both images, and isn't affected by the terrain.

Too bad. Would have been nice.

Anyway, cool idea.

WAS · February 29, 2020, 01:54:21 PM

It's weird that the Simple Shape is somehow clamping the clouds down out of all the peaks. That's too bad. I suppose you would actually need to build a mask of the slopes via functions. I've tried that before but no really sure how. I'd imagine get Normal.

Still a nice way to haze-ify mountains keeping base altitude and 0 and alt offset 1 (so exactly amplitude of terrain) and than crunching down the clouds to the terrain.