vue - Spectral Atmospheres 2

PG · April 05, 2009, 04:08:43 PM

Who claimed TG2 could do it faster? That is one thing that Vue fans seem to be clinging onto though, the time gap between vue and terragen but if you test them both it's not that great.

Mohawk20 · April 05, 2009, 04:49:52 PM

Heheheh, this thread has become one of narcissism

.

You guys are all preaching to the choir, who are about the only ones left in the building

PG · April 05, 2009, 05:29:48 PM

Hallelujah brother. But hey, you don't need to preach to anyone when you look this good.

Jack · April 05, 2009, 05:43:23 PM

I will try and get some renders through mentalray today to show you some of my vue clouds.
anyway terragen certainly has the advantage in terrain generation its unmatched i think carrara 7 has good terrain capabilities but its downfall is when it comes to applying shaders to it. Vue 7 though is very buggy especially compared to terragen 2 personally i think terragen is pretty stable

sjefen · April 05, 2009, 06:05:01 PM

Quote from: wetbanana on April 05, 2009, 05:43:23 PM
I will try and get some renders through mentalray today to show you some of my vue clouds.

Hey.... it's unfair if you use Mental Ray. We can't take the atmosphere from Terragen 2 and render it with Mental Ray.

- Terje

Xpleet · April 05, 2009, 06:11:19 PM

In response to the guy who said that those clouds are not high enough, they are set to be as high as 1 kilometer in the preset i've shown and it has a great field of view so you see a lot at once.

The preset clouds in Vue are driven by a plain simple perlin noise / gradient function which detail is not infinitely driven by distance but by how much you set it. What you do for a closeup shot is you take the noise node and copy it atleast 3 times with 50% and 25% size linking it to a combiner which will blend them in the particular way you like.

This next one took 10 minutes 16 seconds at 1024x768 still from the preset unchanged and driven by that simple noise function.

Jack · April 05, 2009, 06:35:06 PM

Quote from: Xpleet on April 05, 2009, 06:11:19 PM
In response to the guy who said that those clouds are not high enough, they are set to be as high as 1 kilometer in the preset i've shown and it has a great field of view so you see a lot at once.

The preset clouds in Vue are driven by a plain simple perlin noise / gradient function which detail is not infinitely driven by distance but by how much you set it. What you do for a closeup shot is you take the noise node and copy it atleast 3 times with 50% and 25% size linking it to a combiner which will blend them in the particular way you like.

This next one took 10 minutes 16 seconds at 1024x768 still from the preset unchanged and driven by that simple noise function.

those clouds look pretty damn real a little to sharp but your getting there

Jack · April 05, 2009, 06:35:40 PM

Quote from: sjefen on April 05, 2009, 06:05:01 PM
Quote from: wetbanana on April 05, 2009, 05:43:23 PM
I will try and get some renders through mentalray today to show you some of my vue clouds.

Hey.... it's unfair if you use Mental Ray. We can't take the atmosphere from Terragen 2 and render it with Mental Ray.

- Terje

well that's an advantage Vue has over terragen

PG · April 05, 2009, 06:54:20 PM

More like an advantage 3ds Max has

Hetzen · April 05, 2009, 07:04:02 PM

Mental Ray has started to get good, but as far as I'm concerned Vray is better. Maybe I haven't seen what the latest Mental Ray can do, which is more down to my company's policy than anything else.

I just wanted to chime in and say that I actually like those clouds and think they have, for want of a better term, a 'Harry Potter' feel to them. I think that Joe Public doesn't really know what clouds look like, and to be honest, it's not the point. It's more a case of whether the viewer 'buys' the scene. Which often comes from the cutting in the edit, but a lot more from the general compositing/grading of that sequence, which is why you have varying skills on a production workflow, ie 3d modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, editing, within a team of people.

I think it unfair to expect one application to fully achieve all of those disciplines. Which is why I think beyond 64bit, Terragen should concentrate on being able to output separate passes in the render flow, to compliment it's position in that stream. And I'll tell you what; full integration into Backburner would be magnificent.

Cyber-Angel · April 05, 2009, 07:32:11 PM

@ wetbanana,

There are so many processes present in real clouds that Terragen and all other software of its class Vue included do not replicate nor will you find them in the papers on cloud rendering as computers found in use today even the most powerful desktop workstations, are not physically able to replicate a cloud that is 100% physically accurate.

The fact, that is the scientific fact is; that clouds and the mechanisms behind there workings are not fully understood and indeed there are many shades of Grey since many factors about clouds are derived from data sets that come strictly form indirect observation techniques only; there for you will see the following terms used time and again in the scientific publications "It is assumed that..." "it is presumed that...".

The world that Terragen is physically simple, that is to say that the default planet has no axial rotation that provide movement and circulation to the air mass of that planet, the sun in its sky doesn't warm the ground providing thermal up lift currents; its mountains don't force air up to higher attitudes which carry water vapor to condense around Cloud Condensation Nuclei which in the right conditions form the basis of clouds. In the world that Terragen inhabits there is no evaporation of surface and subsurface water, from snow melt runoff, sea spray and a dozen other sources of water vapor that occure in real life.

Physical phenomena that no software considers include light scattering between droplets, cloud albedo and as other have stated multiple scattering which in real clouds is multiple Mie Scattering in both the forward and backward directions.

There are so many things I have deliberately left out of this post as it is forum post not work designed for academia, suffice to say that Terragen for what it dose when used with the right settings its dose well. In closing if you really want Terragen, Vue or any other software to be more realistic in its rendering of clouds then you going to have to go outside of the Computer Graphics literature to do so. For more on clouds see this shred for more about the kinds of phenomana that you'd need to look at http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=599.0

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel

Xpleet · April 06, 2009, 12:01:51 AM

For this rather closeup cloudscape I had to optimize the function just a little to make sure it has a decent quality in front of the cam, so I copied the noise node which was 0.5 in size and blended it with one of 0.2, also increased the repeat factor of the node from 3 to 5.

1024x768 took a whole 42 min 32 seconds.

These clouds are 15% sharp.

The capabilities of Vue7 have to be made clear

. And for those of you who are merely Vue bashers, atleast pretend to act like grown-ups!

Jack · April 06, 2009, 12:04:00 AM

beautiful!

Xpleet · April 06, 2009, 12:09:47 AM

Quote from: wetbanana on April 06, 2009, 12:04:00 AM
beautiful!

Thanks,

I uploaded the Vue file here http://ifile.it/61ok7v5 so someone can benefit from it.

Seth · April 06, 2009, 02:10:04 AM

Quote from: Xpleet on April 06, 2009, 12:01:51 AM
And for those of you who are merely Vue bashers, atleast pretend to act like grown-ups!

The only thing I see, is that from the crappy clouds that I've been post in this thread, the Vue defenders in this forum are not the good one to prove us we're wrong !
If I act as grown up, and I assure you I am, I would say that you need to work on Vue a lot more to convince me that your clouds are good and even to convince me that they are better than TG2's...