Any cloud Wranglers in today?

[Stephen]

1stly i would like to open with T2 is Great! i have already made a couple of renders that i quite like (with a massive thank you to the Ben McDuff tute - it was amazing!)

My coming to you today though is for a reason that i find, well, less amazing.
I have been folowing through 'The Golden Forest' Tute (another great resource) and i cant get it looking right. This is 100% due to my cloud/fog layer. My image took me 18h to render - which is not fun for something that did not turn out as expected  . I did a bunch of test renders, but cloud is hard to judge at lower quilities - so the only way i could tell if it was going to be good was to go for it.. I ended  up cropping it and im still not really happy.


I have played around with depth, height, cover and a bunc of others to get my fog looking foggy, but at the moment it just looks noisy and is too transparent. This was the same no matter what settings i changed - i even ended up adding a mid cloud level and dropping it to ground level stacked on top of the low to see if that helped - it didn't.

anyway here are the files for a squizzie and such

cheers for your time and help in advance  

Stephen

[TheBadger]

18hrs sounds very long for this scene. It will help if you give your system specs and your render settings all details. cloud samples GI levels what boxes in the render tab you ticked.

Here is a link that will tell you the things you need to know to get the fog your trying for, just adjust the settings to your taste. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=13005.0

Welcome to the forums

[Stephen]

I thought 18H was pretty high too. 

Specs for Full render:

Detail:1
Anti-A:8
ray tracing both objects and atmosphere: on
GI detail:2
GI quality:2
Blur Radius:8
Supersample prepass is checked

everything has 64 samples (clouds and atmosphere etc.)

running an AMD Athlon  II x2 250 @3.0Ghz
8G ram

cheers for the link btw 

[Stephen]

I checked out that post and its some gooood stuff 

i have changed some settings around and whatnot and am test rendering now.

i have density of the cloud at 0.08 while its was recomended that 0.006 was probably too much - im testing this out now but my problem was that the clouds were not dence enough - so im not sure if im doing the right thing here or not. Im just going to keep playing until it starts looking right.

[TheBadger]

You can always duplicate the cloud layer for added density. This way you can have it very thin in the foreground and much thicker in the background. You definitely don't want to have mist that looks like clouds. You want it to look like mist.

Sorry I cant help you optimise your setting for your system right now. Its late and I'm having trouble remembering everything I have been taught in these forums. But someone who can help you better than me is likely to be along sooner than later.

Good luck. And post the final scene in image sharing when your happy with the render.

[jamfull]

To optimize your render time I'd recommend turning your detail down to .8 or .6 cause you have hardly any terrain visible. Cloud and atmosphere settings sound pretty high if your using raytrace atmosphere. I can't tell from your image if the noise in the atmosphere is from low samples or jpeg compression. I usually don't go higher than 16 or 24 for atmosphere samples unless I'm not using raytracing. I'd start at 8 samples and work up from there. I also usually put cloud quality at around .8 to 1.2 depending on the scene and let terragen decide how many samples are used. Another thing to try is just turn raytrace atmosphere off and keep the high atmosphere samples. I find it can be faster depending on the situation (in this case I usually start at 24 samples and go up from there).

James

[Stephen]

Cheers for the info.
Im still playing with atmosphere settings to get that misty fog look - it just doesnt want to sit right 

I'll keep the quality info in mind for when im ready to do another hi detail render 

[Stephen]

So i have been playing around with it for a while and still can't seem to figure it out 

I have however come to a nice result that i am more than happy with via a bit a post prossessing 

here is the finished (for now) result.

I will probably go back and have more of a play with it later but for the time being i have a much more pressing matter.. - best start another topic for that one though 

[Upon Infinity]

Just out of curiousity, where'd you get the tree model from?  It's quite nice. 

[Stephen]

thats a good question! i think that it was one of the trees from the walli plant pack.

there are actually a number there - i think i have 3-4 trees and two lots of grass.