Hide Cloud reflection from Lake object

[dreamzfiction]

Hi
Does anyone know a trick to hide the reflections of clouds from showing on my Lake Object. I tried unchecking enable secondary in the cloud preset, the reflections were gone, but the Form shadow of the cloud was also affected, which made it look 2d and flat. So is there a work around to this?

[Dune]

I don't know of any way, but you can render two crops; water with clouds disabled, sky part with clouds enabled, combine in Photoshop. Do make a GI cache file of the whole first and read that for both crops (set to one file). That's the only workaround I know of.

[dreamzfiction]

I wanted rendering as a 10 second animation. O well, thanks for the tip.

[KlausK]

First picture shows what you do not want?

You could use Render Layers. Or --->>

I would render like this:

1 - turn OFF the clouds and render the water surface (if the camera does not move in the animation one picture is enough)

then

2 - set the Lake object to "holdout", turn ON the clouds and render the animation

last

3 - comp the render of the water into the "holdout"

hope that helps.

CHeers, Klaus

[Dune]

Smart. But that would still require comping all the frames, and I guess that's a problem without appropriate software.

If it's just a small lake something like this could work. Perhaps without the card, larger waters will also work. Takes some fiddling to get the color and darkness of the water like you want, and you won't have reflections at all, so plant no trees near the lake edge It may also work without the card, and just the default shader settings of the lake.

[KlausK]

Sure, comping is another step to add.
But, Blender, BMD Fusion or DaVinci Resolve are free and more than capable and
there are definitively other free packages to use.
Animation and more complex stuff should be done this way anyway.
More Control of the final product anyway, often faster and more efficient,
always the saver route for large numbers of pictures.
Learning how to use these tricks (Render Layers etc) is always a good thing.

Since you are only covering up the reflections somehow from the clouds, don`t you think TG has to still calculate them, to check, if they need to be drawn on screen? Would that not slow down the render times unnecessarily?
Rendering clouds is rather slow anyways so having unused calculations in the background would be rather unwanted.

But that`s just me. I am not really interested to do all and everything in TG.
Especially when it comes to animating stuff in it. That is why we have the Render Layers in there.

Let`s hear what the TS thinks about this. He did not say anything about other reflections or plants and so on.

CHeers, Klaus

[Dune]

Yes, you are right. It may be just some clicks and all frames are comped. Never done that.

The reflection is not set to RT, so there's hardly anything to calculate. That might be different when using PT, however.

[dreamzfiction]

I considered setting up the scene in blender, but I rather prefer the realism of Terragen, and it's powerful micropolygon displacement, which is way faster in rendering and more detailed than blender's displacement.

To provide more context, I have included a PNG of the scene I am currently working on
I would also like to add shorelines around the island, any info or links to a shoreline preset would be much obliged

[Dune]

There are possibilities, but you'd have to pull some tricks, and it may not be perfect (but might be made so - this is just a quick setup on one layer, without real water).

[dreamzfiction]

There are possibilities, but you'd have to pull some tricks, and it may not be perfect (but might be made so - this is just a quick setup on one layer, without real water).

Looks believable.
I really like the shorelines, can you share your preset?

In real life, only low-altitude clouds reflect on water, Hopefully the devs will include a reflection visibility falloff for higher altitude clouds.

[dreamzfiction]

I fed a single image render of my scene to runwayml's AI model and it produced a pretty cool 4 second animation

[Dune]

No problem. You'd have to work on it, as it's a test on one layer. If you want transparency at front, you'd have to put this on a lake or sphere object, and do the shoreline differently.
The main trick is to use a distance shader to eliminate reflection in the distance, and give the water a faked reflection by just color. Best to smooth waves in distance too.

Interesting to see that AI can even do an animation like that.