Orange County - (Sorry, Marc)

[inkydigit]

I echo the above...very good work!

[Tangled-Universe]

Just around 1 hour for rendering? Very nice!

I forgot that this scene is excellent for the RTE function.
A major advantage is that you need less samples for clouds and atmosphere when using the raytracer.
I did quite some testing with this and in general you won't need more than 32 atmosphere samples in the majority of cases.
Often 24 samples really is good enough.
Same goes for clouds. Unless very dense and tall you barely won't need samples above 100.
With dense and tall clouds around 300 samples is often sufficient.

Important of course is the AA-level. The greater the AA the less noise.
Finding the optimal AA and sample-levels is key and the challenge.

I don't know the numbers straight from my head but in my cumulonimbus builtup animation I used RTE as well.
It was something like AA4, 24 atmo samples, det 0.5-0.75, GI 1/4 and 256 cloudsamples (~0.3 detail).

You probably know this all already, but perhaps it's interesting for others
Again, fine work and thanks for posting it in the file sharing.

Cheers,
Martin

[dandelO]

Cheers, folks.

The fire depth is 10m in this scene. Not deep at all. What pushes the samples higher here(they're not high at all but they could still be cut significantly with a balance of lower density/higher edge sharpness) is the density of 1. Samples are still only; fire 63, smoke 47 at density and quality both at 1, though.

I'm not relying on GI for much significance here, although it's on, very low. If you want a scene where GI is very important then you'll want a higher overall render detail to make GI relative detail work best.
I could get away with a 0.3 render here simply because there is no terrain showing, little need for high GI, a decent atmo(32)/cloud sample(Q=1) and ray tracing does the business for you, quickly.

I left the AA very low because some cloud grain is not unwanted in such a smoky, dark setting. Also, higher AA would have made the trees even smoother, again, not really required here. AA sampling is also customized, lower to 1/16.

Cut those corners wherever you can!

Try rendering a whole scene of volumetrics in other 3D-rendering packages and you won't be half as quick for the same quality. Never let it be said that TG2 is slow again!

[dandelO]

* Should have said before just to be clear. The licking flame shapes come mostly from the density fractal's noise parameters, not the cloud depth. The Y noise is stretched x3.

And the high yellow colour comes from insane fake internal scattering values(10) for the scattering colour.

Another important thing. The fire won't self-illuminate! You'll still need some lightsource to feed it, if the sun's below 0 there's little light for the fire cloud to bounce around and multiply.

[freelancah]

Oh! Clouds as fire. Very clever!

[dandelO]

Thanks, Freelancah.

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes you have balanced those settings pretty well here.

I'm aware of the relation between render detail and GI and for renders like these it is not convenient.
It would be great if GI relative detail would be replaced by GI detail only.
For renders like these, if you desire, you still need a high render detail setting to get good GI.
You could go for 0.3 detail and GI 3/6, which effectively is GI ~1/2, or go for detail 1 and GI 1/2.

I'm not sure what will be best in the end, but anyhow, for RTE renders it would be really great to have non-relative GI settings.

Martin

[j meyer]

Reminds me of the golden olden days of experimenting.
Nice development.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

burn baby, burn

[pfrancke]

very very cool

[Kadri]

Nice scene , DandelO .

Kadri.

[dandelO]

Cheers!

I had another thought about this one that I might try when I'm not busy with other things. I think if I made the population seeds the same, or similar, to the fire fractal's then it should keep the trees concentrated to the brightest parts of the flames. Here they're just randomly distributed.

I'll give it a go at some point, if nobody beats me to it. Let me know if this is workable if you do try it out.

[Saurav]

Awesome render.

[choronr]

Hey, my fire alarm went off ...gotta be more careful with what I'm looking at. Nice work here dandelO!

[MacGyver]

Believe it or not... yesterday I threw a cigarillo to the ground in the woods (not much a problem now that everything is wet from the melting snow here) and my audio bible to which I listened just came across that verse: So also the tongue is a little member, and boasts great things. Behold, how little a fire kindles how large a forest! (James 3:5)

Very well done!