Flight Level 250

[Saurav]

Descending to flight level 250. A composite using Terragen 2 and a photo inside a Boeing 777-200.

Terragen 2: clouds and atmosphere.

Photo/composite: Window of plane, dust and scratches on the window, blur on the edges of the window.

Rendertime: 15hours per half using 2 cores on a 3Ghz Quad.

2048 cloud samples, 16 atmosphere samples, render quality 1, AA 5, GI 2,2.  A big thanks to 'gastar' for sharing his cloud file as this is where I got the inspiration from. It's tweaked quite a bit from the original posted file.

[gastar]

That is a nice idea.... good work...

thanks for using my "big cloud" .... 

Gastar

[Phylloxera]

Good idea !

[FrankB]

Ah, I was unaware of the fact that you've been up to a similar challenge as I :-)

The cloud is just beautiful, and the composition makes it interesting even more.
I'm wondering why you need more that 2000 samples for the cloud. That seems a bit much. I found I can go with a density of 0.2 and get away with ~400-500 samples for the cloud.
In turn, I had to up the atmo samples.

So why have you required so many cloud samples, I'm curious!

Cheers,
Frank

[Saurav]

Frank that was part due to my laziness.

While setting up this scene, I was happily experimenting with the clouds samples and I had forgotten to set it back to 1000 for final render. Usually for thick clouds I set somewhere between 500 -1000 samples for final render, I find that gives good details for the clouds.

I'll be sure to try out your render settings next time I decide to do a big cloud render.

[dhavalmistry]

nice clouds Saurav!

[nvseal]

Nice one. How did you get that great cloud shape?

[rcallicotte]

Fantismo cloud.  I'm believing this one.   

[Tangled-Universe]

This looks really nice Saurav!
Great clouds, impressive scales

Like NVseal asked: how did you get those (billowy) shapes?

[moodflow]

The shape and quality are really nice.   

Do you have any tips on settings? 

[gastar]

the cloud depth = 20000 in my file which you can find in the share area.... this is why the cloud are going so high.... but this need so many samples, if you use lower then 500 cloud samples, there is to much noise....

here a little example from my share file..... with 1800 samples, AA10, detail 0.85

rendertime: 5 hours

Currently I render this in 1600x1200 and I am waiting....

Gastar

[rcallicotte]

Thanks for sharing.  This is cool and has been a long time desire of many of us here.

[moodflow]

Yes, this is really nice.  The scale of the billows is nearly perfect.  Many thanks for this.

I personally spent a few months solid working on a billowy cloud format, but it always had strange artifacts (bad with good).  I'm glad someone else got it right.

[Saurav]

Take a look at gastar's 'big cloud file for a good start,

Here were my settings for this cloud.

Cloud depth: 15k
Edge sharpness: 3
Cloud density 3:
Coverage adjust: -.05
Base wispiness: 1
Base softness: 1
Coverage gamma: -3

Feature scale: 40k
Lead-in: 20k
Smallest scale: 20
Contrast: 1.5
Coverage adjust:-.25
Roughness: 1.5

Noise: Perlin Billows
Noise Variation: .9
Buoyancy: .75
Clumping variation: .4
Lead in warp: .5

[rcallicotte]

@Saurav -

Contrast: 1.5
Density:1.1

Which is which?  There is no Density textbox.