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General => Image Sharing => Topic started by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 03:18:30 AM

Title: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 03:18:30 AM
There are several images in this forum before the rain and some after the rain, but very few during the rain. Maybe from a distance with beautiful rain curtains below the clouds.

I wanted to have a scene with the typical light when the sky is completely overcast. I could probably have used a dense cloud layer, but I had another idea: I created a huge plane above the whole scene and assigned a white selfilluminating (2.5) material to it.
So there is absolutely no lightsource in the scene except this plane and of course the environment light that makes the white light bounce. I used GISD with a very high (3) ambient occlusion.
The rain is a localised cloud layer with a very small vertically stretched noise which is slightly rotated by a transform shader (thanks to Ulco for this obvious solution!!!).

Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Dune on January 15, 2016, 03:21:40 AM
Terrific!! I love this. Good idea about the big plane. I used localised illuminated planes sometimes for lighting certain areas in front (before the spotlight), but this is a very impressive use.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Volker Harun on January 15, 2016, 03:41:53 AM
Very cool image ... I like the lighting and shading very much. (<-- !!!!!!!!)

MoodFlow used an inverted sphere instead of a plane ... maybe slower than your approach.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: mhaze on January 15, 2016, 04:00:29 AM
This is great, very moody and dank.  May I suggest some water droplets on some of the plants.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 04:25:04 AM
Quote from: mhaze on January 15, 2016, 04:00:29 AM
May I suggest some water droplets on some of the plants.

You may. Look closer... ;)
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: DocCharly65 on January 15, 2016, 05:19:21 AM
Oh wow! I had somthing like that in my wishlist since more than a year! Great, Hannes.

Ähem... looking closer was not a soooo goood suggestion... I found something: Is that a root or a branch with angular shapes?

But anyway terrific!

Could it work to add an invisible plane with some droplets on it to make it look like droplets on the camera lense?
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: inkydigit on January 15, 2016, 05:26:26 AM
Excellent scene, and proof of concept!
Like a giant soft box.... Just like a real overcast sky!
I am going to have to try his!
Cheers Hannes!
Jason
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 05:30:42 AM
Thanks guys!
Nils, I know the branches are somehow squarish. I built this thing out of an existing tree, so I had to take what I could get. Bothers me too!! >:(

That droplets-on-the-lens-thing sounds cool. Gonna think about that...
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: AP on January 15, 2016, 05:31:39 AM
The effect looks fairly convincing and refreshingly wet. Good job on the cleaver trickery used.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 05:35:14 AM
Btw, I know that the droplets on the plants are far away from perfect. Since there is no way to create populations on populations, I just created a pop of spheres with a glass shader assigned to them and made them hover above the ground. The grass is very dense, so it's (hopefully) not too obvious that they aren't attached to anything.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 05:48:52 AM
Just for fun some quick and dirty photoshopping...
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Tangled-Universe on January 15, 2016, 07:13:55 AM
Cool work Hannes :)

I like the way you created the lighting setup.
My first choice would also be to use a cloud layer and use the depth or density to control how much of the shadow are visible.
This works nice too :)

For the droplets on the lens you could try positioning a tiny plane just before the camera (up to 10cm or so?) and place your transparent droplet texture on that.
Then enabling the DoF in the renderer you can create more correct results for this.

It remains to be seen how well visible it is, because unlike many people think, stuff on the front lens isn't causing troubles as often as one thinks.
The last element before the sensor/film, that one needs to be stupendously clean.
So if you'd ever buy a second-hand camera/lens and there's a tiny scratch on the front lens then say "I pay x euro less because of the scratch" while in real life the scratch barely causes visible isssues :)

Anyway, it's perhaps a nice idea to play with if you like and if you don't mind the added rendertime.

Cheers,
Martin
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: AP on January 15, 2016, 07:21:31 AM
The droplets do look like they are attached to the vegetation. It looks to be convincing enough.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 07:24:35 AM
Good to hear, Chris. Thanks

Yes, Martin, some sort of reusable versatile droplet plane would be great!
There are some reference images in the web, but most of them are focused on the droplets, and the background is blurry. I'll have another look, and maybe I can create some real geometry to get also some refraction inside the droplets.

And maybe this is just render overkill crap...  ;)

I'll try anyway.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: AP on January 15, 2016, 07:43:49 AM
No problem.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: bobbystahr on January 15, 2016, 10:26:08 AM
Quote from: Hannes on January 15, 2016, 04:25:04 AM
Quote from: mhaze on January 15, 2016, 04:00:29 AM
May I suggest some water droplets on some of the plants.

You may. Look closer... ;)

holy crap that's good...thanx for the invite to look closer...I rarely zoom that far in...brilliant image all round. Thanx for the illuminating plane technique reminder...used that a lot in Imagine for inexpensive no shadow area light...
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: zaxxon on January 15, 2016, 11:14:35 AM
That's a wonderful idea and resulting image Hannes! I much prefer the first image, something about a render imitating a camera seems a little off to me  ;). I like the creativity and the mood. excellent!
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: j meyer on January 15, 2016, 11:56:05 AM
Keep up the experimenting spirit. 8)
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Kadri on January 15, 2016, 07:48:28 PM

I like both of them.Nice images Hannes.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: TheBadger on January 15, 2016, 10:17:16 PM
please more rain and stuff like this. Very interesting to me as well.

Also, this light box thing you are doing, its just a plane used as light? how does this work exactly?
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 16, 2016, 06:00:44 AM
It's quite simple. The environment light, which doesn't cast any light to the scene on it's own, makes the light from the selfilluminating plane reflect onto the scene.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Kevin F on January 16, 2016, 08:27:02 AM
Nice image, very atmospheric (no pun intended!). I like the rain effect, especially that it's done within TG. I tried several years ago using a short free utility that enabled the addition of "rain" by overlaying small dots on the image and streaking them. It had basic controls like colour, size and direction. Can't find it at the moment, but might be tempted to post a couple of rainy images made using it myself.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Cocateho on January 16, 2016, 01:45:10 PM
Nice solution and very well executed!
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Rumburak on January 16, 2016, 07:51:19 PM
I like it very much. The rain is amazing. I tried to get something like that several times, but unfortunately I didn't even come close to your results. Could you share your settings for the 'rain cloud'?
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 17, 2016, 05:00:45 AM
Sure! I'll post the file as soon as I've made it scaled correctly.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Hannes on January 18, 2016, 04:10:47 AM
Done. You can find the tgc in the file sharing section.
Title: Re: Rain
Post by: Rumburak on January 18, 2016, 10:06:24 AM
Thanks a lot, I will give it a try as soon as I'm back home.