Clouds R&D

[Macker]

Please Chaos-group, make another plugin specifically for clouds/atmospherics! Perhaps a large amount of the R&D that went into phoenix could be used?

At the moment the only real option for people is more 3rd party stuff like Ozone, which whilst it produces fantastic results I find it's integration to be really, really clunky and difficult to get to grips with. I'd love the simplicity of being able to create a vray sun & sky and then just pull in a chaos group atmospherics plugin to do all the rest.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Yea I agree... quick way of adding large amount of clouds as well as having options to get down and dirty to shape them up and down would be amazing...

[wyszolmirski]

I think that as it would be great to have built in cloud plugin, I don't think that it's something Chaosgroup should focus on. If there is any way to improve performance / add some features to VRayEnvironmentFog that should be the way to go.

I am pretty sure that I could get some very decent clouds using procedural maps inside 3ds max, but at the moment render times are a bit steep for animation.

Few thoughts:
- I feel that current model doesn't work well with adaptive DMC. I feel it's very often oversampling it.
- Maybe there is an way to improve performance with some way of baking fog data, adding different sampling method or adjusting existing one (steps based on distance from camera?).

[Sliver_Creations]

Please Chaos-group, make another plugin specifically for clouds/atmospherics! Perhaps a large amount of the R&D that went into phoenix could be used?

At the moment the only real option for people is more 3rd party stuff like Ozone, which whilst it produces fantastic results I find it's integration to be really, really clunky and difficult to get to grips with. I'd love the simplicity of being able to create a vray sun & sky and then just pull in a chaos group atmospherics plugin to do all the rest.

This! I would instantly buy it if it was less then $1000,-

[Macker]

I am pretty sure that I could get some very decent clouds using procedural maps inside 3ds max, but at the moment render times are a bit steep for animation.

I really don't think the 3ds max procedurals lend themselves particuarly well to anything other than cumulus clouds without some extensive setup & testing, which itself is very time consuming. Plus one of the most fiddly things at the moment is creating a gizmo several kilometres in size to encompass the clouds - otherwise they will come down to ground level - perhaps something that could be overcome by changing the "fog height" to a "minimum fog height" and "maximum fog height" rollout?

It would also be good to have a "fog height falloff distance", so that it doesn't abruptly begin or end at the specified height.

[Raven]

Allan Mckays tut on clouds with fume. Could be adapted for phoenix, I'm gonna try with Volume fog as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfYoGZ7xviw

[Macker]

@chaosgroup people;

Are "complex" procedurals particularly difficult to program?

[richard_rosenman]

I just did a little experimentation with this a little while back too. I hadn't played with VRay fog before so this helped me learn a little more about it.


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-Richard

[grantwarwick]

I'll try and put together the bercon composites I've generated while doing Vray Fog RND.

Got some really interesting results.

[Morne]

I just did a little experimentation with this a little while back too. I hadn't played with VRay fog before so this helped me learn a little more about it.

-Richard

The legend returns!

I miss your stuff on here Richard, you should post Hatch stuff and your own stuff more often. It's always inspirational...

[yyk]

I just did a little experimentation with this a little while back too. I hadn't played with VRay fog before so this helped me learn a little more about it.

Hey man, interesting tests - thanks for sharing!

[instinct]

@chaosgroup people;

Are "complex" procedurals particularly difficult to program?

Nope. It is hard to come up with complex procedurals that represent what you are trying to emulate. For clouds it is pretty damn hard. And a "dumb" procedural is only going to work for very few edge cases in my eyes.

[Macker]

I think the first step to getting any decent clouds to work is have the vrayenvironment fog have both min & max fog height numbers - certain cloud types occupy specific areas of the atmosphere.

A lot of the examples posted here look great, except that they are all from above which is of absolutely zero use to me, which is a shame. All of my projects are (sadly) earthbound.

[DaveGrafix]

Great thread folks! Nice images too.

I've been playing off-and-on (mostly off) with creating clouds using VrayEnvFog since it was added to Vray years back. Rendered these test images a few months back after coming up with a new trick to control the volume shapes. Of course rendertimes are still an issue... these can be somewhat slow to render. Haven't tried bringing them into the Vray 3 beta yet.







Hoping we get some additional tools to manage these types of atmospheric effects, Vray is already one of the best swiss-army-knife rendering solutions out there!

Cheers,

Dave Stewart
Freelance Digital Artist
3D Design | Animation | Matchmoving | Compositing

[Morne]

I've been playing off-and-on (mostly off) with creating clouds using VrayEnvFog since it was added to Vray years back. Rendered these test images a few months back after coming up with a new trick to control the volume shapes.

Cheers,

Dave Stewart
Freelance Digital Artist
3D Design | Animation | Matchmoving | Compositing

Dude! These are looking pretty good. I prefer the first 3. Were the mountains just displacement? Could you share some more info on the environment?