Stormy Monument Valley (kind of)

Started by pokoy, April 23, 2014, 07:02:09 AM

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TheBadger

It has been eaten.

Oshyan

True, perhaps "monochrome" was going a bit far. The noise tends to be less saturated than that though, as you say. So perhaps desaturating it a bit would help.

- Oshyan

pokoy

Ok, will remember this for the highres version.

I tested the scene with 'defer atmo' enabled, and while the clouds and fog looked way better and more defined, the image was a lot darker, probably due to the more thorough soft shadow evaluation from the cloud layer. I may have to get back to tweaking in order to get the same brightness... conclusion: TG is complex, but it's amazing  :D

Matt

Quote from: pokoy on May 07, 2014, 11:18:37 AM
I tested the scene with 'defer atmo' enabled, and while the clouds and fog looked way better and more defined, the image was a lot darker, probably due to the more thorough soft shadow evaluation from the cloud layer. I may have to get back to tweaking in order to get the same brightness... conclusion: TG is complex, but it's amazing  :D

Defer atmo/cloud shouldn't affect the lighting. Do you still have the defer atmo render? They're all great, by the way.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

otakar

I completely missed this. Wow, this is stunning! Superb job on the sky, but the terrain is not to be dismissed, either.

bo0x


Darknight

Great work! Is the sky entirely from Terragen?
It's not who you are that matters, it's what you do.

pokoy

Sorry for the late reply, I've been drowning in work for the last weeks.
Thanks for the kind words everybody!

Matt: That's strange. I have a ground cloud layer, though. I guessed it might render a bit more 'solid' with Defer Atmo on, effectively having an impact on camera rays through that layer, resulting in a darker image. Once I have all my render PCs connected to the network again I'll do some tests with the cloud layer enabled/disabled and see if it helps.

Darknight: Yes, it's all Terragen. It wasn't that hard after all, a lot of tweaking, but I think TG really shines when it comes to rendering clouds and atmosphere in general.

sjefen

Would love to see this one rendered bigger. Its a fantastic render
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/royalt

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
128 GB RAM
GeForce RTX 3060 12GB

pokoy

Sjefen,

thanks! Here's a version @1920px with slightly different colors. There's a visible artifact (straight vertical line) left to the center of the image in the clouds, not sure what it is, so don't look to closely ;)

http://www.mswee.net/pic/monumentvalley/home_overcast_41_v01_1920px.jpg

The original render of this is 3200 px wide. Once I have sorted out how to render this with Defer Atmo I'll post a link to the high-res final version.

Tangled-Universe

Great looking render, really like it!

Generally I advise against rendering with defer atmo, but I guess you want it in order to get the cleanest result possible, isn't it?
So what are your current render settings and especially AA setting?

I found out that 16 atmosphere with AA8@1/16th still performs reasonably well.
However, when clouds come at play and especially >1 cloud layers then this will change quite drastically.

My approach to testing this would be to test it on a per cloud layer basis and after finding the optimum for each layer render a crop "for real".
Quite likely, because of shadows from one cloud layer to the other, the result will have some more noise, but I estimate an increment of 0.1-0.2 for cloud detail will fix it then.

What you should keep in mind though is that with AA8, for example, the pixel noise threshold is 0.0375. If the pixel noise drops below that no more AA will be applied.
However, there's a chance you still see grain and you think you need to up the cloud detail, but there's still grain when doing so.
Likely, the AA value along with the pixel noise threshold (which actually determines how clean the result is) cause it to still be noisy.
Then you would need to up AA and start over again (a bit) with determining the cloud quality.

So perhaps it's wise to first see if your AA value of choice will give you the result you're looking for, before you're starting to optimize endlessly without realizing the AA value might never be able to give you the result you're looking for.

You may now understand why I advise against RTA and especially when you do so with clouds, because first of all it's complex and secondly it barely ever is faster than non-deferred rendering. So instead of experimenting for hours with RTA I just render it with several dozen of atmosphere samples and high cloud quality and I'm sure it will look fine. Kind of "fire and forget".

zaxxon

Thanks for the insight TU, while it's intended for the poster, this is much appreciated instruction for all of us.

pokoy

Yes, very useful information there, thanks!

The main reason to use Defer Atmo was that I've briefly tested it and all volumetrics looked better. The only drawback was that the image rendered way darker, I need to find out why. Render times went up as well, so I'll need to find a good balance between quality vs. time.