I had a look at some Hubble images and wondered if TG would be capable of creating some nice nebulae. I disabled primary in the athmosphere tab and GI as well, played around with the clouds and additional lights (the sunlight isn't really needed here) and added the stars. It's some instances of a real 3D model made by a meshed particle system out of 3ds max. So it's possible to fly through. Rendertimes are quite high so I'll see how far this goes. The flares are postwork of course and the contrast is a little bit increased.
Really interesting work here mate:)
love the colours and cloud structures
Looking really interesting, keep on going.
I was working on something similar a few weeks back, your way ahead of where I got to.
Cheers
Richard
these are looking spectacular indeed...please keep going!
:)
Very good looking. This is much better than many attempts I have seen on television shows.
This is an interesting idea and it's a practical use of TG2 that could be ultised for movies.
My thoughts are maybe it's possible if you take a few cloud layers of different colors, make them immense in size and raise their altitude to astronomical heights. It'd take a good deal of finagling will all kinds of settings to get the desired effect, I'm sure. Then backlight with several sunlight sources. I did a quick test with cumulus cloud altitude at 3e+006 just to see if that much worked, and TG2 didn't have a problem with it. You'd certainly need to postwork in the stars and lens flares, though.
This may not be exactly what you're looking for, and it may not work the way you want it to. But it's just an idea. I remember someone once posted a thread here - in File Sharing, maybe where the nebula effect was a colored power fractal connected to the background shader. And I know it's possible connecting an image map shader.
Edit: - oops - my bad. I didn't read it carefully enough. It's the stars that were made with 3ds Max. Never mind!
This is a great looking image.
So these gasses where clouds from TG2? or were they from 3dsMax as well?
If I read it right, you say the clouds are TG2.
Anyway, I love it :)
Thank you guys. The stars are some instances of an object imported from 3ds max (a particle system with a lot of spheres converted to a mesh) and rendered together with the rest in TG. The lens flares are postwork, but the nebulae are pure TG.
By the way, right now I am rendering an animation of this. 200 frames. 800X450px. Rendertime per frame two hours. See you next year! :(
Quote from: Hannes on March 15, 2012, 07:03:53 PM
By the way, right now I am rendering an animation of this. 200 frames. 800X450px. Rendertime per frame two hours. See you next year! :(
lol, render times like that don't scare me anymore, I now live in that hell indefinitely.
I'm glad you are doing this hannes! I recently did a search in the forum for nebula, and found some nice stuff. But it looked like everyone got to a certain point and then just quit on it.
Do you have any of the test renders from earlier stages you can post? I would like to see more from this.
OK, here is one of the first attempts. Far away from what I had in mind!
Nice nebulae Hannes !
The render times are mostly too long for this kind of things.
I always thought why they mostly do 2D kind of composite images and especially animation.
After one or two tries it makes sense.
Animations made slower then with i7'ns do not make much fun probably.
Excluding some of the masochistic members we have here around :D
I am curious about your animation Hannes :)
Wow nice :)
Hannes
Hi, you know, I like the wip too. I think this is a very interesting project!
There are a lot of difficult problems you will have to figure out to make it work, but it looks like you will do it.
Take a look at this animation: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/13/video/a/
Its pretty simple as far as the 3D world goes. And I think your image is far more aesthetically pleasing. But just think about the camera movement in the video in relation to your nebula. DandelO was doing some experiments recently that I think relate to what you are doing: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=14068.0
I bet one or both of you could figure out how to make this work in TG2 alone. That is, I think that it would be great if it could all be done in TG without having to go to another software. Do you think its possible? What made you use 3DMAX, was is necessary, or just faster?
The scale is a big issue. How big is a nebula relative to a single world, and to a solar system (in general terms)
What kind of file size are we talking about if we want to fly a camera through a nebula (at scale), and land it on a planet? Is it possible?!
Talking about scale; render times are longer if scales of clouds are high, simply said. So if there's nothing to relate size to, why not decrease everything tenfold (or hundredfold)? Is that a viable option?
I have just been experimenting a few minutes and found that you can easily make another planet (or more) encircling earth, make some huge populations of rocks (or spheres) spread over huge areas, with huge distances between instances, and sit them on those heavily displaced terrains on those encircling planets, while unchecking render atmo and terrain of course. You end up with a sky filled with rocks/spheres at various distances from earth's terrain. You can displace the rocks or make them into stars by using a luminant default shader or surface shader.
@TheBadger:
I think we shouldn't relate to much on real world scale. I'm not sure if we could see anything of the nebula even if we were right inside it. It's probably far too big. Not talking about the speed a spaceship needs to fly through such kind of nebulae. Even with light speed it would most likely be a very slow travel!
It's just an effect... By the way, I don't know if I you may have got me wrong regarding 3ds Max. I only created the starfield as an object in Max and exported it as .obj, imported it into TG and converted it to a .tgo. The render is pure TG.
@Dune:
Yes, size matters of course ;D
Seriously, I don't know if I could change the scale settings of the clouds without changing the whole shapes, with which I'm very happy now. Maybe I'll check that out, when the animation is done. 2015 maybe... ;)
The population and rock solution is a very clever idea. I first thought about using tiny little clouds when I started this thing, since someone had done this before. But I was too impatient to make hundreds of tests with some other cloud layers and chose to import this starfield object (which was made in less than a minute). I'm not that much of a purist, who says everything has to be done in TG. In my opinion it's the final result that counts.
Something else, I'd like to share the starfield object, but even with WinRar I can't get it any smaller than 900KB...
(Frame 24 has just started to render. Rendertime actually 46 hours!)
@ Hannes and Dune.
Ok, you guys are right. Real world scale now sounds rather silly after thinking about it. Even if the software and my system could do it does sound pointless to try something like that.
Really my main concern is realistically representing the distances from one object to another. If the camera is closely moving past a planet with a nebulae in the background, visually, the background will move only so much (to the eye) relative to the foreground as determined by size and distance. But if the planet is real world scale and the nebulae is smaller than the planet in real world scale, you can see that there would be visual problems, depending on how far the planet is from the nebulae. I see now why Kardi thought compositing and other means would be easier.
I am not a TG2 purist lol :D I just don't have much practice with other 3D software. So the more that can be done in TG2 the better, for now.
@Hannes
I really want to see your animation now! I think just seeing it would answer most of my questions. How long did you say, 5 years :P ;)
@TheBadger:
I want to see it too! ;D
Anyway we have to be patient.
69 hours rendering now. Actually frame 35. Maybe a little less than five years. Let's be optimistic!
Finally here is a 139 frame animation of this. I decided to stop rendering here and move to other projects.
http://vimeo.com/40416706
That's pretty amazing Hannes! Hard to believe it was done with TG2. Were you raytracing the atmosphere?
- Oshyan
No, I didn't. It's just some cloud layers and a lot of coloured lightsources. And of course the stars model.
Cool, Hannes! Must have been hard to place all lights and move around to position them well. How many are there?
Eleven, and yes it was painful!!
Hannes there are some small problems but i didn't expected this so to speak :)
I think it looks great! There is much potential.
Very good, Hannes! I get frustrated at those popping artefacts when animating stars and things. Great job!
8) Yeah man,far out man. ;)
Impressive !
I'd be interested to know your system spec and render times (the one in useless without the other)
Cheers
Richard
Thank you, guys. I have to say that I like it too but I'm not entirely happy with the quality of the renders (popping stars, flickering lights and the planets look a little bit like milk drops...).
Cyphyr, I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ with 3 GHz RAM, not the most powerful machine, so it took two hours per frame to render.
Btw Dune, I just saw that there are only nine light sources including a sunlight.
Instead of explaining things I decided to put the scene (without the stars - the model is too large for the forum) into the file sharing section, so you can explore it yourself.
Awesome!
Its really good hannes.
I'm really glad you posted the file. Thanks for that.
i was wondering where this was...
must have missed it before.
thanks for sharing!
That reminds me, I actually did a re-render of this at 720p and in higher quality. Turned out pretty nice. Here's an MP4 download:
http://www.oshyan.com/tmp/nebula4-final20mbit.mp4
- Oshyan
Oh wow, thank you!
Thats great!
Oshyan, should I be able to download that, or no? Couldn't seem to do it, not sure if its me or not. Its very nice, you can get a little dizzy looking at it.
Render time per frame? Just curious.
Oh yeah: Oshyan.com ! Looking forward to seeing this. Just as a start, its impressive that you managed to get ownership of your name with a .com. Hard to do.
Badger, right click/option-click/long-click and download/save as. It should play with Quicktime on a Mac.
About an hour per frame render time on my i7 920 at 4.6Ghz.
Having a fairly unique name makes it a bit easier to get your name as a domain. ;-) I've had it for years but haven't done anything notable with it, so don't hold your breath. But I do have long-term hopes and plans for it...
- Oshyan
Ha!--> 4.6Ghz! Well thats it right there! When the summers over, or I get AC in this room, I need to Overclock this pig! ;D
Sorry Oshyan, right clicking gives no joy. Can only save as a web archive. May be me, but tried it with firefox too.
Ill try again later, needs me a beer now.
I'll upload it to the Planetside Youtube channnel with Hannes' permission (and attribution, of course).
- Oshyan
Granted! ;)
Damn, that looks sweet!
Very nice work Hannes and kind of Oshyan to render it out, awesome!
Looks nice :)
I think the Discovery channel or History channel will soon be contacting you to do some work for their space specials!!! Love it....keep on man!
And here it is on Youtube: http://youtu.be/_czP1bYQnvA
- Oshyan
Great shot ! As always ... longer ? :)
Richard
I'd love to make a longer version of this in the future. Lots of other things going on at the moment, but I'll keep it on the back burner.
- Oshyan
Just found this post today. I rendered the animation at low resolution MPD 0.3, AA3. Surprisingly only took about 1.5 hours to render 200 frames, but I am calling that one monet-like nebula. I have 200 beautiful stills, but lots of flickering going on too in the animation.
Oshyans render looks impressive. I may give it a whirl at higher settings just to see. If it is 1 hour per frame, I might change that to the old pc and compare.