Hi everyone,
today I've spent time on the Golden Forest tutorial, this is my result. Here I've used 2 clouds layer, the first for a softer touch (I don't know the word in english, but it's the effect of the air getting thicker in the background, that sort of fog), and the second one for a more present 'fog'. It's hard to explain these kind of things in another language...
I would like to have some advice/critics/anything, really many thanks. Now I'm trying adding some water like a reference picture I found.
Valentina
The lighting is superb as a start. So where will the water be? I guess this is a crop...
indeed great start!! Keep going. You are on the right track for sure.
Excellent! A link to this tutorial would be fantastic also. :)
Wonderful
This is a great classic tutorial by Ryan
https://archer-designs.com/tutorials/making-of-golden-forest/ (https://archer-designs.com/tutorials/making-of-golden-forest/)
Hi, thank you all.
I'm sorry luvsmuzik, I though that since this is a very famous tutorial I didn't need to add the link.
Dune, That was not a crop, and I added water in the foreground of the frame, but I don't like the result: infact I like this render to be veeery foggy, and the water is not really visible as you can see in the following render (which has a postwork in photoshop to get more contrast, as in the tutorial) . Plus, I lowered the density of the popolation with the result of some kind of fire, more than the Sun :-\. Probably too high the exposure of the camera. I'll keep going working on it.
[attach=2]
And then less bright
Ok it appears I'm not able to add attachments properly.. The first you see is the less bright, the end-of-post is the fire-sun.
Sorry for the poor quality, it takes long to render. And as everytime, sorry for my english.
Ps Can I post the render on my Artstation profile, quoting of course Ryan Archer and his website?
Thank you :)
Valentina
I see what you mean now. There's some reflections of the trunks at front, so there's the water. But it's hardly discernable as water, due to the presence of the front fog patches. I would diminish those (or leave them out completely), and I would try to make a shoreline of some sort. After that works fine, the you can subtly add some fog again, which should be a little softer too, IMO.
Echo what Ulco says.
But anyway good start. I like the concept and the mood of the scene.
Hi everyone,
I've followed your advice and this is my current result: I moved the camera in order to see more of the water, I used my 'fog' cloud layer just as a way to give some haze and spread the light, and I put the little clumps of fog just in the foreground. I also put some plants near the camera so I have a darker frame (I know I should probably use some depht of field, now...).
Is this render an improvement?
thanky you,
Valentina
That looks really beautiful. Have you tried to check "receive shadows from surfaces" in your cloud layers to get some nice beams?
Thanks! I'm trying to get some god rays but I still have troubles, Probably due to quality, maybe they are there but I can't see them, sounds possible?
This is very much better indeed! Godrays is a good idea (just working on one myself).
I agree with the godrays. But in general already a big improvement and very beautiful render!
Very nice! Yes, the water adds interest.
Hi, thank you all. I've added god rays in comp with a pass from terragen.. I don't have the pro version, so I created the pass by hand.. Maybe rays aren't many, and much visible, but I think they add something to the render. Still rendering, though !
edit, here it is. What do you think?
Have you played with the edge sharpness of your haze to catch light?
Stunning image! :)
Fine piece of work!
wonderful!
Thank you, I'm very happy you like it :)
WASasquatch, the edge sharpness of my light fog layer is 1, and the sharpness of the second layer (the one in the foreground) is 0,5. I like how sunbeams are right now, but I definitely can play more with those values since they will only affect the pass and not the overall effect of the render (since I prefer to deal with volumetric light in comp).
2 thumbs up! 8)
Full marks on this, well done on the revisions!
Beautiful!
Edge Sharpness is not going to affect your beam strength or sharpness much, I think. The "edge" being referred to there is the way the edges of the cloud itself are handled. Beams are not "edges" of the cloud, but rather, areas of light and shadow contrasting with each other.
Just to be sure, you do have "Receive Shadows from Surfaces" enabled in both your cloud layer(s) and your atmosphere, right?
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on August 01, 2018, 05:10:28 PM
Edge Sharpness is not going to affect your beam strength or sharpness much, I think. The "edge" being referred to there is the way the edges of the cloud itself are handled. Beams are not "edges" of the cloud, but rather, areas of light and shadow contrasting with each other.
Just to be sure, you do have "Receive Shadows from Surfaces" enabled in both your cloud layer(s) and your atmosphere, right?
- Oshyan
Are you sure? All the god rays tutorials I've looked up specifically note to increase edge sharpness, for example to 10.
You'd think, just like you said, it effects the edges, which receive silver lining. However, when it's a haze, those edges are fuzzy throughout the clouds (especially with no density input or solid noise). I can't imagine the cloud system just simply "disables" edges in it's algorithm just because the noise is hazy and density low.
This would be something cool to have fully investigated for documentation because there seems to be a lot of misconception when using tutorials and than talking about said use in the forums. Lol
For example in my water scenes playing with the shadow maps, increasing the edge sharpness from usual 10 to 200 (cause I had receive shadows disabled) seamed to increase the mount of "streaking" within godrays which may it appear there was more detail in the shadow rays than when lowered to 10. Maybe I'm mistaken
Hi Oshyan, yes they are checked. My fog sharpness now is 1. With 5 as value, I get really brighter beams, while it doesn't change much from 5 to 20. And it affects mainly brightness, since I can see much more the difference between light and shadow. I think I couldn't be able to explain me well . Quality of the beams is mostly matters of quality render, I've made some test, but we are talking of really long render times. I've learned about godrays and volumetric effects in Maya, here workflow is really different.. I'm afraid I misunderstood WASasquatch, probably I didn't understand what he meant :(
edit: now it's becoming difficult for me to follow you in english, however, these that follow are some of the tests I've made: on the left sharpness 1, on the right 5 (5 and 20 were almost the same).
[attach=1]
here is: sharpness 20, density 0.006 and high high quality
[attach=2]
It seems to be as I thought. It plays a role in the brightness of capture light, which defines gograys better, as the shadows (actual bits making the god rays) don't receive this gradienting brightness. The brightness is probably coming from the silver lining effect like I assumed from original tutorials.
Here are some tests.. I can't really see differences between 20 of sharpness and 20.. just light seems to spread much in the 200 sharpness one (I can see less blue of the sky), but only if you switch from one picture to another. Probably I would see more difference with higher resolution
[attach=1]
Quote from: Valentina on August 01, 2018, 07:28:31 PM
Here are some tests.. I can't really see differences between 20 of sharpness and 20.. just light seems to spread much in the 200 sharpness one (I can see less blue of the sky), but only if you switch from one picture to another. Probably I would see more difference with higher resolution
[attach=1]
Hard to really tell, but sorta looks like the shadows are a tad clearer in the 200 sharpness one (which could be a trick from brightness in highlights being tad stronger). You could try taking the two images and overlay them in Photoshop with the Difference layer, which will show pixels that are different between the two renders.
I think sharpness increases the difference between cloud and no cloud, the contrast sort of. So, logically in denser cloud you'd have more visible godrays, but it decreases in other areas. You might as well leave sharpness very soft (or use no cloud fractal at all and extremely low sharpness) and increase overall density of the cloud for better godrays. There seem to be differences in strength of godrays in stuff like sun glow amount and power and maybe light propagation and scattering.
And it's faster to use v2 cloud than v3.
Quote from: Dune on August 02, 2018, 01:23:08 AM
I think sharpness increases the difference between cloud and no cloud, the contrast sort of. So, logically in denser cloud you'd have more visible godrays, but it decreases in other areas. You might as well leave sharpness very soft (or use no cloud fractal at all and extremely low sharpness) and increase overall density of the cloud for better godrays. There seem to be differences in strength of godrays in stuff like sun glow amount and power and maybe light propagation and scattering.
And it's faster to use v2 cloud than v3.
That's what I did, I think you're right.
WASasquatch, this is the difference:
[attach=1]
It's entirely possible I misunderstand (to some degree) what Edge Sharpness does (Matt is the only one who fully understands everything in TG), but I understood it the way Ulco explains: the difference between cloud and no cloud. The visible (light) area of a sunbeam is not "more cloud" and the dark (shadow) area is not "no cloud", they are simply "lit cloud" vs "unlit cloud", so I would not think they should be *directly* affected by sharpness. I.e. I don't think the sharpness should be directly influencing the sharpness of beams. *However* it could easily have an effect on beam sharpness anyway simply due to making the normal variation in the cloud structures sharper and more defined, sort of increasing overall contrast within the cloud volume, which would make the bright bits brighter. It's not making the edges sharper per-se, but increasing contrast as a byproduct.
If all that is correct, then it's not a bad idea to increase edge sharpness somewhat for "god rays", but it's neither necessary nor ideal for every scene. It's just something you can increase for some added effect.
I'll see if I can get Matt to verify any of this.
- Oshyan
In this situation my recommendation would be to leave "edge sharpness" at 1, or at least not too far from the default. Instead, I would change "cloud density". For the most part it will have a similar effect on the appearance of the cloud, but the reason for preferring cloud density over edge sharpness is this: the automatic sampling adjustments that derive from "ray march quality" are more strongly influenced by cloud density than by edge sharpness. In other words, if you set cloud density very high, the render quality will adjust accordingly to keep the noise levels the same, but if you do this with edge sharpness it will not increase sampling to the same degree, meaning that you might have to increase ray march quality much higher than is typical for most scenes.
My general advice would be to use edge sharpness to adjust the edges of distant cloud or clouds that already have fairly well defined edges. For thinner fog and mist effects I would always choose to control the density with cloud density.
For more details - more than you probably ever want to know! - there's this:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,24572.msg249771.html#msg249771
Anywhere the Density Shader is >0, the density of the cloud at that point will be >0, proportional the value coming from the Density Shader. The actual density is further affected by "edge sharpness" and "cloud density" in the following way: it is multiplied by "edge sharpness", then clamped so it never exceeds 1, and then multiplied by "cloud density".
Both "edge sharpness" and "cloud density" have the ability to change the density at the edges of clouds. However, because of the clamping, only "cloud density" can change the density everywhere.
Regarding so-called god rays, the reason these two settings affect them is because they affect the density of the medium, therefore affect the apparent visibility of the medium, which affects the visibility of the god rays.
Matt
Thanks Matt, so it's basically what I thought, but explained much more clearly and in greater detail. Cool. :)
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on August 02, 2018, 05:51:03 PM
It's entirely possible I misunderstand (to some degree) what Edge Sharpness does (Matt is the only one who fully understands everything in TG), but I understood it the way Ulco explains: the difference between cloud and no cloud. The visible (light) area of a sunbeam is not "more cloud" and the dark (shadow) area is not "no cloud", they are simply "lit cloud" vs "unlit cloud", so I would not think they should be *directly* affected by sharpness. I.e. I don't think the sharpness should be directly influencing the sharpness of beams. *However* it could easily have an effect on beam sharpness anyway simply due to making the normal variation in the cloud structures sharper and more defined, sort of increasing overall contrast within the cloud volume, which would make the bright bits brighter. It's not making the edges sharper per-se, but increasing contrast as a byproduct.
If all that is correct, then it's not a bad idea to increase edge sharpness somewhat for "god rays", but it's neither necessary nor ideal for every scene. It's just something you can increase for some added effect.
I'll see if I can get Matt to verify any of this.
- Oshyan
Recently Matt explained it and it sounded much more advanced, actually isolating the cloud boundaries/edgesbased on the fractal. Cloud-no-cloud sounds just like density. Density also exponentially changes the intended look.
I'll take some time to study all what you've said :) thank you!
Quote from: Valentina on August 02, 2018, 05:05:12 AM
Quote from: Dune on August 02, 2018, 01:23:08 AM
I think sharpness increases the difference between cloud and no cloud, the contrast sort of. So, logically in denser cloud you'd have more visible godrays, but it decreases in other areas. You might as well leave sharpness very soft (or use no cloud fractal at all and extremely low sharpness) and increase overall density of the cloud for better godrays. There seem to be differences in strength of godrays in stuff like sun glow amount and power and maybe light propagation and scattering.
And it's faster to use v2 cloud than v3.
That's what I did, I think you're right.
WASasquatch, this is the difference:
[attach=1]
So there is indeed more god rays (contrary to discussion), and also seems to be more highlights on the foliage itself which is odd.
Matt's explanation above matches my understanding. I was using a simplified explanation (intentionally), but it works just as I thought: by influencing the transition area between cloud and no cloud (the "edges"). The end result is that it *does* have an effect on godray intensity but only because it effectively changes the density; changing the density directly has a similar effect and is a better approach.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on August 03, 2018, 04:30:33 PM
Matt's explanation above matches my understanding. I was using a simplified explanation (intentionally), but it works just as I thought: by influencing the transition area between cloud and no cloud (the "edges"). The end result is that it *does* have an effect on godray intensity but only because it effectively changes the density; changing the density directly has a similar effect and is a better approach.
- Oshyan
I think what's being forgotten in this whole scenario, that I tried to iterate from the beginning is the silver lining effect. This creates "whiteness" and in a soft cloud, helps these godrays have a base and fade rather than relying entirely on density, which isn't realistic for volume....
You can plainly see these effect in the difference between 100 sharpness. It really can't be argued, it's plainly there. Density will exponentially effect this effect, but usually just upping density, will also of course give you denser clouds and change the whole look. That's why a combination of sharpness and density works great, as seen in results rather than talking technical...
A sharpness of 1, needs a bit higher density, creating thick fog. What if you don't want thick fog? One look may be a good trade off for someone else, but my be directly what they're trying to save from.