Cloud Plume (Anim final section)

[PG]

couldn't think of a better name for it. This took 60 hours and 33 minutes and comprised of 4,111,724 microtriangles and was a pain in the butt
If anyone can think of a less sucky title I'll take suggestions.

[Mahnmut]

I can see an elephant!

[inkydigit]

damn cool clouds!

[rcallicotte]

Cotton Balls Gone Wild.

Nah. 

Seriously, I like it okay, but I think there's a bit too much density.  This is difficult, so I'm not going away without making a couple of suggestions.  One is up your buoyancy in the fractal shader.  Another is increase the detail of your cloud's detail.

[PG]

Another is increase the detail of your cloud's detail.

Samples? If so it's at 8000 already Although if I turn the ray traced shadows off it'll help the render times if I increase that.

[rcallicotte]

Oh, crap.  8000 is too many, I think.

[PG]

Any lower and it turns into a grit festival. It's an inherent difficulty with Terragen, the more humungous the clouds the more you have to pump steroids into the samples to avoid a grilled noise sandwich. It just seems like Terragen hasn't been developed for complex cloud systems and while that's only a problem for marshmallow fluff fetishists like myself it does leave a bit of a limitation in the program.

[rcallicotte]

I think you might be right, PG.  I have been experimenting, nonetheless.  Hopefully, we can make some breakthroughs with the clouds or get tips from some pros or maybe something needs to change in the program to make the clouds more dynamic and their lighting more realistic.  I don't know, to be honest.

[PG]

I've never tried clouds of this density with soft shadows to be honest. I thought ray traced shadow render times were punishment enough for my childish curiousity. Maybe having accurate shadows with accurate interaction with the cloud formations and realistic lighting colours, blah-di-blah-di-blah will render this scene more visually astounding than the rather lacklustre image that's now starting to get on my tits.

[rcallicotte]

Just take what works and keep at it.  Someday, unless there's something that's a weakness somewhere in the bowels of TG2, we will make clouds that match what we see in nature.

[Oshyan]

8000 seems incredibly and unnecessarily high. It sounds like you've done tests to make sure that lower settings just don't get the results you want, but at those levels I would expect the difference between even 4000 and 8000 to be minimal, and for the render times to be a lot longer for the latter. Hopefully you've also tried different combinations of overall detail level and atmosphere samples as both can sometimes affect cloud noise. If you're really needing samples for the clouds that high I'd be interested in seeing some crop renders at different lower levels.

- Oshyan