This is the big cloud I said I was trying to warp the other day. The render time was far too much for me so, I'll just have to post a still, for now.
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Cheers for looking! :)
Nice :)
Not surprised of the long render times.
I tried something along these lines but was upset and didn't tried other things. And this was for a still :)
Just curious the upper and lower part looks kinda different Martin? Postwork etc. ?
Cheers, Kadri.
The only post processing was to sort out a couple of broken stone displacements and a bit of colour correction. Oh, I slightly de-noised the water and clouds, too.
Here's the tgout image...
Thanks Martin :)
The cloud is pretty mega, but IMHO the fake stones steal the show....very realistic! J
Thanks, Jonathan. You can download those same stones from here... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12428.0
:)
Thanks Martin, will have a gander. J
Like this one a lot. The low point of view and composition is impressive. The greenish coverage on the rocks is perfect - must try this some time.
Cloud seems a bit yellow-ish to me, but nice shapes. I'd really like to see it animated. I'm going on vacation for a week or so quite soon and have 2-3 i7's that will be idle. If you can get me the scene file in the next 24-36 hours I can probably have it rendered by the time I get home... ;D
- Oshyan
Thanks, Bob. :)
Oshyan, I shared the .tgd elsewhere and removed all the animated parameters before I did, without an incremental save, so, give me a little time to rearrange things and, of course, since it was only the cloud and sun that was animated and the scene now has water and some broken stones, I'll need to do something with those as well. I'll get back to you before the day is out. Thanks a lot! :)
Sounds good. :)
- Oshyan
I've just sent the file to you, Oshyan.
Fixed(well, hid) the broken stones, the altitudes of the wet layer needed adjustment, I needed a really small patch size when the compute terrain node was after the stones to make the altitude constraints work properly and it was really increasing the render time, I changed my mind and finally settled on moving the compute terrain back up to before the stones layer and just used 'final normal' altitude constraints for speed, it did look better with the smaller patch size but it's still fine this way, and quicker.
And as I said in the pm, I hope I have the timings right for the water, I think it should be cool.
Thanks again!
p.s. I'm not seeing the yellow tint you mention here at my end. Does anyone else notice that?
The yellow color is subtle, could be interpreted as simple under exposure too. I'll play with it a little if you don't mind...
- Oshyan
Cool. The exposure is just default settings in the file, the .exr output was very close to blown-out in the sky, I used some pretty extreme internal scatter lighting(6) and higher than normal propagation mix(0.25) so I didn't think I should raise the exposure and lose any detail.
I like to have a darkish cloud colour with lots of fake internal scatter lighting, this leaves the shadow areas nice and contrasty while keeping the whole thing nice and bright. I know those settings pretty far from physically 'correct' but it's a good way to have nice detail in the shadows/edges of fractal features and also in the brighter parts of a cloud at the same time. Raising the ambient colour is a good cloud control too but not this time, as I wanted the contrast. Actual 'scattering colour' has no effect on my version(as I used no GI) so you might have a play with that area too when you enable the envirolight. :)
Here's a crop of the .exr. Pretty blown.
Righteo, I'll mess with it a bit, but not too much. ;D
- Oshyan
Quote from: dandelO on February 26, 2012, 05:13:29 PM
Cool. The exposure is just default settings in the file, the .exr output was very close to blown-out in the sky, I used some pretty extreme internal scatter lighting(6) and higher than normal propagation mix(0.25) so I didn't think I should raise the exposure and lose any detail.
I like to have a darkish cloud colour with lots of fake internal scatter lighting, this leaves the shadow areas nice and contrasty while keeping the whole thing nice and bright. I know those settings pretty far from physically 'correct' but it's a good way to have nice detail in the shadows/edges of fractal features and also in the brighter parts of a cloud at the same time. Raising the ambient colour is a good cloud control too but not this time, as I wanted the contrast. Actual 'scattering colour' has no effect on my version(as I used no GI) so you might have a play with that area too when you enable the envirolight. :)
The whole cloud has a sort of defocused appearance to me. I think this is because the edges are quite soft. The high fake internal scattering gives the impression of bigger clouds that should have sharper edges, and this might be exaggerating the impression of everything being out of focus.
I would bring the fake internal scattering value back down and then increase the edge sharpness (or density) until you get the level of lighting you like.
Overall shapes are pretty good though.
Matt
I think the edge sharpness was 35 and density was 0.01... 2 secs, I wrote the settings down elsewhere for someone...
QuoteMain tab; Depth=2000, localised=3000m radius, value at radius=-0.25, edge sharpness=35, density=0.01,
Colour tab; colour=0.25
Lighting tab; Glow=1, glow power=2, light propagation mix=0.25, fake internal scattering=6.
Tweaks tab; Flatter base, base softness=0.325.
The actual noise fractal was pretty much default cloud fractal settings, changed to billows, noise variation = 0 and colour contrast = 2.
I think I slightly lowered the colour roughness to 1.25 but that's all I changed there, except for minor adjusting of the the warp amount. Scales were default.
I was pushing the boat out with samples as it was on this computer, I went as high as 50 for sharpness when messing around but eventually reset that back to 35 to save some cpu effort! ;)
Cheers, I'll keep your advice in mind, though!
The main thing is the high value for fake internal scattering. What I mean is that I think it will look better with a much lower value, combined with an even higher density and/or edge sharpness on the clouds which will brighten up the clouds again to where they were when you had the high scattering value.
But yes, higher density or edge sharpness will probably increase the render times.
This might be a situation where you can use "step optimisation". Try a value of 2 or 3. I would usually only try it on very dense clouds like this.
Matt
I animated the clouds, water and camera and sent the file to Oshyan, who thankyouverymuchly rendered it at 1280x720p. :)
I've s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d it out as far as I dare to and you can watch the video here: http://youtu.be/QKtdyFvm4e4
Best fullscreen!
Cheers!
Going to try and upload a version that's not so compressed. The clouds are very muddy on Youtube. I'll switch the links once I've done.
Nice animation Martin. Especially the foreground looks real :)
Cheers, Kadri. :)
Better quality version on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/dandelo/smoothinterlude720p
Hmmm...I think I agree with Matt. With cumulus like these I use settings like these quite often:
- cloud diffuse colour = 0.3-0.4 and scattering colour is twice to two-half times higher.
- edge sharpness from 25 to 80 and density = edge sharpness/1000 (so 0.025 to 0.08) (you can also try the other way around)
- glow amount around 1
- light propagation around 2 for starters
- propagation mix around 0.5
- fake internal scattering around 1, mostly I slightly increase it to 1.1 or 1.2, but sometimes also to 0.9-0.8.
It depends a bit on the lighting how these settings eventually work out. For clouds like these I would always avoid to have the sun behind the clouds.
Mostly something +/- 100 degrees from the camera works best.
The glow is still a mystery to me. Try setting them both to 0 and you'll still see strong burns in your EXR output.
Getting the scattering curve right is uber-tricky.
Another trick is to increase ambient colour a bit in the clouds which brightens up shadows but also the clouds themselves.
Then together with the scattering and cloud colour settings you can achieve interesting looks.
You probably know most if not all of these things, but I thought I'd share them for the ones interested to read.
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks, Martin. Interesting idea to try to keep density=sharpness/1000, I'll play with that at some point.
I totally bypassed the scattering colour here as there is no GI present for speed so, in this instance at least, it's not applicable but I do always use a higher colour here when it has any effect.
The light propagation mix setting is something I often overlook but here I think I doubled it to 0.25 for a good deal more brightness than default. I certainly know about the fussing with glow amount in clouds and the ambient setting is very good to use when you're like me and constantly trying to avoid excessive GI render time! :D
Cheers, man!
I'm not sure what you mean with the ambient setting in relation to GI?
It's another way to adjust/alter the darkness of the clouds and shadows.
With GI at high settings the shadows won't be really brighter, only more detailed. Upping ambient makes shadow brighter, but rather reduces detail in general.
So if you'd ask me it's not of much use when you're going for low GI solutions. I only use it to balance things a bit further, if necessary.
If you like I can give your clouds a shot to get the lighting ironed out a bit.
Knowing Oshyan rendered it it also surprised me that this isn't rendered with GI.
For nice clouds, GI is critical/essential.
I just didn't have the time to adjust settings to account for GI, and it had already been tuned to at least look decent without the GI.
- Oshyan
Martin, if I don't use GI for a project, I find I can assimilate a decently lit cloud with combinations of the many different colour/lighting options in the cloud layer, ambient colour being one of them.
I think 'nice' is subject to viewer discretion, I've seen many nice looking TG clouds without GI.
That isn't to say that I wouldn't rather be able to go that extra mile to render with a more regular lighting setup but on my only working machine at the moment, I'm not always able to.