Clouds R&D

[wyszolmirski]

Hi,

I'm trying out VRay fog for procedural clouds. Idea is to create set of low and high clouds that could be easily combined for different shots.

First preview:



Did you guys use it that way for some commercial projects successfully ? I would love to see effects.

Best regards,

Tomasz

[wyszolmirski]

Another test. Still needs some work, but it's almost good enough for some aviation shots we want to create.

[vlado]

Heh that looks cool Although the procedural shape looks a bit odd (clouds don't form such well defined separated blobs).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

Great work Tomasz! Would love to see some more shots of this, and maybe a tut for this like you did with the fruit pretty please?!?


Can you give us any details in the meantime of how long these took to render and what kind of system you rendered it on?

[DPS]

that's really cool - is it all 3d?

[kosso_olli]

I did some commercial stuff for IWC's pilot watches using this technique. Will look for the images, I think I still have them somewhere.

Regards

Oliver

[wyszolmirski]

Thanks guys! Yes, all 3D and I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. Maybe it's worth trying to simulate clouds with FumeFX or Phoenix. I don't have any of them at the moment so it will wait.

I don't remember the render time exactly, but it's not very fast. Around 1.5 h for full HD. I did render it with 1 eye rays per pixel (min 1, max 4 adaptive dmc, with noise threshold at 1.0) and pushed the quality in V-Ray fog settings. I still have to experiment with making it faster somehow. I can do an making of if I will be sure that this could be successfully used in production.

Best regards.

[raymarcher]

Best clouds I know are those from Lumion, and those are realtime:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh73wmYX2NE

[super gnu]

id agree lumion is great, and considering its realtime its amazing, and also the clouds have the most natural forms... but for rendering of realistic skies ozone/vue are better (but oh so slowww)


http://www.ozone-plugin.com/showcase/

one annoying thing is you get much more atmospheric control in the full vue, despite ozone being their dedicated sky product. i guess they want you to buy the full vue.

[kagemaru]

We've just completed a commercial where i used environment fog for clouds, unfortunately it isn't already released so i can't show you how it turned out (maybe in a couple of weeks).
We had just one major shot, but clouds had a specific animation both lighting and animation wise so i ended up rendering a library of single frames clouds and then do some camera projections and deformation tricks in nuke.
I have to say the quality of the volume itself it's really really good, scattering gi, etc but in max you're somehow limited by the atmospheric "apparatus", so for example i wasn't able to cast volumetric lighting (aka godrays) at the same time of rendering clouds.
Here are single clouds frame i did and one still from the final comp.

[wyszolmirski]

Those are some really cool examples !

[Neilg]

We used ozone for a shot in a film a while ago and for full frame, photo realistic (seriously, they looked amazing) clouds at 1080p, 1 1/2 hours a frame is ok in my book. It's slow to test and get the look right, but we were passing right through them over a few hundred frames and it worked great.

Used it a couple of times since to render skydomes & cut the clouds out onto alpha objects, so it looks more 3d than a skydome in big aerial shots.

[super gnu]

thats not a bad rendertime, was that using the full shizzle lighting and quality settings ( its been a few months since i played dont remember which options were the killers) - i was trying to do create an epic cumulus stack with a sunset illuminating it.. was way too limited artistic control and sloooooow... for me , the limitation of not being able to define custom cloud volumes in ozone was a deal breaker, you need the full Vue to manually place and shape clouds. otherwise youre stuck tweaking settings to try and get the shape you want. whilst squinting at the preview window/postage stamp.

id kill for the procedural cloud forms and light behaviour of ozone, in max, with a viewport preview (point cloud?) and the ability to use meshes to define cloud boundaries. that would be the one IMHO.

im not sure that vray env fog , even with the correct procedural generation, can match the realism of ozone, although im not sure whats missing. lets just say ive spent many many hours trying to get a decent cloud that has nice solidity and behaves like a cloud under the various lighting conditions.

in my opinion an ozone like cloud generator would be an awesome and obvious upgrade to the stock vraysky, which invariably cant be used for the final scene as its so flat.

[Neilg]

the limitation of not being able to define custom cloud volumes in ozone was a deal breaker, you need the full Vue to manually place and shape clouds. otherwise youre stuck tweaking settings to try and get the shape you want. whilst squinting at the preview window/postage stamp.

Oh, yeah. after we did this job I tried to do a personal work with it and gave up so fast. If the clouds you need aren't too specific - you just need cg clouds of some form and they dont need to do anything, it's great.

[sjmoir]

Pretty cool:

http://vimeo.com/28004567#