Turn off GI in clouds

[ethan]

Does anyone know where the turn off button for cloud GI is? Having some major flicker problems and need to kill the problem. Alternatively is there a way in the new beta to bake in a GI solution?

Tnx
-ethan

[PG]

There's no button but you can decrease the GI sample quality to 0, although to be honest I'd say increasing it would probably be of more help.

[Tangled-Universe]

I think you'd have to set the envirolight strength to 0.

[dandelO]

Here's the thing. Does the 'Enviro Light' slider in the cloud layer use the actual enviro light node? I get discrepencies* confused when using it, with proper GI and without.

* Edited to be more truthful.

[rcallicotte]

This is the real next step, I believe in our community understanding of clouds.  At least, it's my next step.  It's where I quit learning about two months ago, when all I did was play with clouds.  I had some beauties, but could never get the accurate lighting.

[Tangled-Universe]

Here's the thing. Does the 'Enviro Light' slider in the cloud layer use the actual enviro light node? I get discrepencies* confused when using it, with proper GI and without.

* Edited to be more truthful.

As far as I know it does. Thinking in logic I can't think of any other lightsource responsible for the enviro light.

The "fun" thing with clouds is that quite some settings inter-relate quite much. So you might expect discrepencies/confusing results when adjusting certain lighting conditions because the other settings don't match.


Some time ago FrankB and I went through some of the lighting settings and I think if you guys go over these again and start from there then you'll soon start to understand these relations. It's unfortunately not something I can tell/write down here, it's something you just have to learn to understand.
Here's that topic:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4666.0

Personally I think a lot of progress can be gained by mastering the settings discussed in that topic alone. If I look at many clouds here the "flaws" are often in these settings.

Martin

[rcallicotte]

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5503.0

Check out the actual picture Frank is working from.  If we want to maintain integrity, we need to admit that the lighting in those real clouds comes nowhere close to anything we've seen (maybe from Luc) at anytime with TG2.  Close?  I'm not even sure close, except in Luc's case.  Frank's clouds are great, but that lighting distribution doesn't work out of the box and it most certainly hasn't worked with 99.9% of everything in this forum. 

So...I appreciate TU and Frank's work to explain these settings, but the reality is that no one has it down or we (or someone here) could explain it as well as Volker can explain terrain texturing.  Once that happens, we'll see a revolution of awesome cloud / atmospheric work.

The closest I ever got to anything is here and I've included the TG2 so people can see how much I jacked around with the lighting - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3691.msg46623#msg46623

[Oshyan]

Turning Envirolight Strength in Atmosphere to 0 should work.

- Oshyan

[Matt]

Or setting the cloud layer's Enviro light value to 0, as was suggested. Both would have the same effect on the cloud layer, but the former would affect all cloud layers and atmospheres. These values act as multipliers.

Matt

[dandelO]

These values act as multipliers.

Ahhh, so this is why I'm finding discrepancies with clouds GI. But... Once the main enviro-light strength in atmo is disabled, what is the enviro light in the clouds multiplying? I still get differences between settings.