Foam vs. Atmosphere

[gardocki]

I'm tearing my hair out trying to get this to work. I saw the previous thread (http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...al+perspective) with a couple workaround for the limitations of Vray's atmospheric rendering, but I still can't produce decent results.

Here's the scene I'm trying to render without Aerial Perspective. Foam is rendered in Point mode:


Here's the scene with Aerial Perspective and Phoenix on:


Here's the scene with Phoenix moved after AP in the Environment effects list. The splashes show up but they have a strange orange cast:


Here's the scene with geometry mode turned on. Vray gives me the error "Material returned overbright":


Here's the scene with geometry mode turned on and the rendering mode set to Bubbles. The foam appears but is very transparent:


And finally here's the same scene with the diffuse multiplier set to maximum. The foam is there but is still very thin:
http://i.imgur.com/MJaUqmq.jpg

What am I missing? Is there really no way to make this work?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

In geometry mode the Approximate Scattering can't work and is disabled - this is most likely the cause. Does the diffuse multiplier have any effect between 1 and 10? If so, you could force it out for range using maxscript. If this does not work, another thing you could try could be to increase the count multiplier so you'll get a bigger mass of particles that would look brighter. Yet another thing you could try would be to set a white map in the Environment slot of the Bubbles. How many Bounces do you have for the Bubbles?

Another question - what mode was the particle shader when you turned on geometry mode and got "Material returned overbright"? Was it point mode? Would it be possible to send that scene over to support so we can debug it?

Thanks very much and hope some of these would be helpful, cheers!

[gardocki]

The diffuse multiplier does have an effect. Using maxscript to force the value to 25 gives a noticeable increase in brightness but once again it introduces an orange cast to the shading that does not look very accurate (or maybe it is, I've been staring at this image so long I can't tell anymore):



The particle shader mode was indeed point mode when I received the error. This was simulated with the nightly build from 3/3/17 if that makes a difference. I've uploaded the scene file here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ter%20test.max

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Roger that, simulating right now and will see what's going on...

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, well I couldn't fund anything worrying about the setup - my guess right now would be that the yellowish color is because of the effect of the V-Ray sun, which gets exaggerated by the diffuse multiplier. You could try to counter that effect if you change the color of the foam from (242,242,242) to something more light-blue or cyan - I tried (130,190,255).

Hope this helps - in tomorrow's nightly the diffuse multiplier would be able to go as high as 50 in the GUI.