Other environment plugins besides Vue and Dreamscape?

[Morne]

Hi all

Are there any other plugin(s) available for max that will let you make fast realistic clouds, distance haze, horizon effects, and terrain? (Besides Vue and Dreamscape that is)

We all know the story about Vue inside max. Dreamscape seems ok but I'm concerned about the program's life expectancy. I mean when last was it properly updated besides fixing a bug or two and making it work with new max versions? Also have you seen the crappy gallery on Sitna Sati's site? Don't even talk about their forum which I've never been able to access even though I am a client of theirs.

Only other plugin I can think of maybe is Groundwiz, cool for terrain but I don't think you can do the other things I mentioned above?

[mike_kennedy]

Same Cpmpany as Vue but you might want to try Ozone......
Sort of given up on dreamscape.....

[Morne]

Ozone

Same Cpmpany as Vue but you might want to try Ozone......
Sort of given up on dreamscape.....

Ozone looks freaking awesome! The trick question is: does it work with VRay?
Also does it work in general or does it give the same crappy problems the new Vue7.5 xTream does?

Anybody have some images they can show that was created with Ozone and Vray?
(if they work together)

Dreamscape still seems like the way to go for ocean scenes though?

[duke2]

No, it doesn't work with VRay (although theres no reason a future version won't with them supporting it in Vue now), and yes, it's pretty stable and gives great results. I'd use it more if it DID support VRay, because right now I have to have a seperate sky pass and a seperate sky_reflection pass where all reflective items have a mirror finish, everything else is matte, and I comp them together in Photoshop. It's a pain in the buttle.

[duke2]

Hope you don't mind me answering your PM here so others can see I've only ever used this on stills, not motion. The sky pass from this took about 7 minutes at 4961x3508 (A3 @ 300dpi).

I put this:



On this:



Using the green channel of this:

[percydaman]

we do all our glass like this 90% of the time. Its not uncommon for my glass layers to be 30-50 layers or more depending on the complexity of the bldg.

[Morne]

could you tell me a bit more about how this was achieved? I'm unfimiliar with this workflow.

[joconnell]

It's no biggy in this case - what you do is make a nice sky image in vue and render it out as a panorama so you've got a high quality sky reflection map essentially. Then in vray you hide everything besides your glass with the vray matte properties and give them a 100% reflective setting with no fresnel - this gives you a full strength sky reflection for the windows of your buildings. The green and red images are the vray multimatte element which is just a handy render element which gives you something you can easily use for a mask in photoshop or after effects. The mask is used to overlay the sky reflecting in the glass render on top of the main buildings render and then you use colour correction or opacity in ps or afx to give you the levels of reflection you want. In percys case it sounds like he's doing a lot of very selective tweaks on individual areas of the image causing the 50 layers, rather than some bananas method to get a look (just in case it sounded scary )

[Morne]

Thanks for the info. I've got to give this a try!

[joconnell]

Yep - the more you can do in 2d the better. You can do an awful lot of dirty little hacks to fix problems and enhance shots in a comp.

[Bathyscaph]

World Machine 2 is a great program specifically for building realistic terrain. It's worlds above any terrain you could build in Vue. It also exports to Terragen although I've never needed that feature so haven't tested it.

What's really great about it is the erosion controls which do great things to anything you build.

It is easy to take the displacement maps from World Machine and bring them into ZBrush or max/Vray.