Tropical Sunset

[aknight0]

Trying for a really big telephoto sunset over the ocean.  Still not sure about the water, but I'm pretty happy with the rest of it.

[Dune]

Very nice. Maybe calmer water, or rougher, but very big waves, with more patchiness might be interesting to try.

[WAS]

Wow that's nice. I've tried this a few times and didn't really have any luck, this definitely gives me renewed inspiration.

I agree with Dune, though I always stugger getting waves looking right in scenes, alas I knit pick my own work though.

[aknight0]

Here's one with bigger waves.  Might need more patchiness.  It's tricky, as the waves are very far away due to the FOV.  This is with the wave scale at 1000.

[Dune]

I don't know which I like better. Maybe even the first one. It's a pity you can't soften and 'distort' the sun by atmosphere, like in reality. Maybe if you'd take a planet's atmosphere instead of the sun, with illuminated cloud/atmo and some warp.....

[WAS]

Hmm could maybe use v2 clouds and match up a simple shape with sun location and warp on Z towards camera.

[Dune]

Yeah, I think there are ways to make this very realistically. Might have a go at something like it, one day.

[Dune]

I had a go at this and came up with a shared file here: Distorted sun(set)

[aknight0]

I couldn't resist giving that distorted sun a try in my scene, and I think it looks pretty cool.  If you look closely though, you can see a faint border around the bottom part of the sun.  Maybe an artifact of the opacity masking?  I left the normal sun on as well, and turned off the visible disc, so maybe that has something to do with it.

[Dune]

I see what you mean. I'm pretty sure it's the opacity mask indeed, so you could turn it off. No stars behind it that should be visible anyway. And what if you turn normal sun off? You won't need it.

[DocCharly65]

Looks good!

[WAS]

If you used a SSS shape, it has falloff issues, which that looks exactly like what it is to me. It suffers from colour continuity errors similar to other shaders, like craters shaders displacement continuity. Same issues with my galaxy backgrounds, can never get a smooth perfect transition to black.

My circle method I posted recently in function sharing should work to smooth out the radius.

[Matt]

If you look closely though, you can see a faint border around the bottom part of the sun.  Maybe an artifact of the opacity masking?

Are you using a Default Shader? If so, make sure to set base colour and Fresnel reflectivity to 0. How are you creating the transparency?

[Dune]

I used a default shader indeed, and had color set to 0. I actually don't know about reflectivity, have to check (it's on by default now, so I might have forgotten). Transparency is created by widening and hardening the SSS mask, and plugging into opacity mask of default shader fed into the surface shader carrying luminosity.
But in the meantime I've found a better method by just projecting on background. No transparency/opacity  needed then.

EDIT: yes, forgot fresnel reflectivity!