No fog for V-Ray proxies?

[ShaunDon]

Hey folks.

I'm working on an animation and I'm trying to use fog to get some atmospheric perspective down this street. My trees are all proxied, and I was hoping they would look like less of a cluster with fog -- but to my surprise it doesn't seem like they take the fog at all! Anyone know what gives?



explanation: the strip running across the middle has the fog far% at 5.0. while the top and bottom it's at 2.5. Just to exagerate the problem.

Thanks guys.
Shaun

[percydaman]

im not seeing any difference in fog between standard meshes and vray proxies.

[ShaunDon]

Sorry Percy, the difference is subtle but everyone here in our office commented on it. I upped the fog to 20 for uber exageration. Actually, I kinda like it this way.



more info -- these trees are collapsed & proxied onyx trees with vray mats.

Shaun

[percydaman]

Im not saying there isn't a disparity in your image. its pretty obvious...lol What Im saying is that I cant reproduce it.

Here is a test. Its a square tube. The left half is a vray proxy and the right is a Editable Poly.



I zoomed in and sampled the pixels and there is no difference where the two meet. I WILL tell you that the first time I tried this test, I couldn't get fog working properly AT ALL, until I exited out of max and retried. Maybe your having a similiar issue? have you tried to recreate the problem in a fresh running max?

[Candelero]

Hi ShaunDon,

Are all the Trees one single Proxy or all of them are separated... ?

Best Regards,
nikki Candelero

[ShaunDon]

nikki -- good thought, I wouldn't have considered that, but they are instanced copies of the same proxy. I'll bet that's the problem. Maybe if Vlado's lurking he can confirm and suggest a fix, obviously percy proved proxies do take the fog, and I've inserted other proxies into the scene since posting to test as well with success.

Thanks for the hand, guys.

Shaun

[Candelero]

Actually it is hard to say where exactly the problem is...
I have also made a simple test here



As You can see the fog is working ok, either on the single proxy column and on the multi-ones...


Best Regards,
nikki Candelero

[Da_elf]

question....are there transparencies on those trees? i havent tried in a long time but i remember max fog didnt work with transparencies

[ShaunDon]

d'elf, there are transparencies -- the leaves are opacity mapped. The trunks do not, however they're all in the same multi-sub mat, so perhaps it's disregarding the whole thing?

Shaun

[ShaunDon]

You guys ready for a curve ball? I distributive-rendered a frame with my workstation and one render node. The render node applied the fog to the trees, my workstation didn't. What's up with THAT?? *groans*

Shaun

[ShaunDon]

Yeah, so, problem solved. DaftPunk sent me a pm suggestion which somehow I didn't see till now to check off "Optimized atmospheric evaluation" -- I did and everything's behaving again. Thanks again to all!

Shaun

[CCS]

I thought you had a good idea with the fog, so thought I'd give it a try, since I've been playing with Onyx again lately.

[czoog]

I thought you had a good idea with the fog, so thought I'd give it a try, since I've been playing with Onyx again lately.

Looks good Scott, is that a standard off the shelf tree or one you made yourself. (Asking because I don't recognize it from the standard collection)

[ShaunDon]

I'm absolutely loving the Onyx software -- we bought it for this job, and honestly it's the best $600 we ever spent! They so above and beyond every other plant system. While we're on the topic, have you done any massive scenes with Onyx? I guess by massive I mean at least a couple million polys. Max gave out calculating the geometry at render, so I had to switch to using proxies, but that means no wind...

[CCS]

I started with a canned preset (don't remember which), then changed the parameters quite a bit.

Just one tree, converted to vraymesh/proxy, then instanced about 20-30 times, and did a random rotate and scale. That's what I love about Onyx - you don't have to come up with 30 different trees.

Render time is awful high though, especially for a roughly 400x300 frame. But I do have reflection, refraction, area shadows, fog, etc. You think it could be lower? (about 7.5 million faces)