Improved Sun and Sky Systems - more adjustment possibilities

[Dmerc]

We use Sun and Sky Systems oftenly to start scenes. Still meanwhile it feels like the Vray Sun+Sky could use a little facelift. Especially areas around horizons oftenly tend to have a broad area of greyish color + have a tendency to overexpose ...

The two alternative systems do little help.

It's hard to describe, but it would be great to have more options to finetune the haze-thickness towards the horizon, and other color adaptions etc.

Thanks
xoio

[joconnell]

Just as a very cheeky temp fix, put your sky map into a vray comptex, put a gradient ramp into the other slot, set the grad to spherical mapping and rotate it 90 degrees. Set this to add and you've an extra fade / add control on it. Or use multiply mode for the blend and use a slightly brighter sky to start.

[vlado]

Yes, there is definitely place for improvement there; hopefully we'll get to that.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dave_Wortley]

Yes, there is definitely place for improvement there; hopefully we'll get to that.

Best regards,
Vlado

I vote for a full Sun/Sky/Cloud system that would kick Vue's ass!

[vlado]

I vote for a full Sun/Sky/Cloud system that would kick Vue's ass!

Ah, well let's not get carried away

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

Ah, well let's not get carried away

Best regards,
Vlado

Why not?
Could be another major plugin with its own development team.
Then you'll have VRay, PhoenixFD, and "EnviroSphere"

[joconnell]

Doing a properly optimised raymarcher and cloud sculpting / creation plugin is a huge job in itself and not everyone needs it. If you look at the majority of people's renders they're all using hdri light sources with clouds in the bitmaps. If you use a proper cloud generator for those type of scenes you'll murder yourself with render times and you don't really need it. If you're doing a big shot where you've to fly through clouds then it's a whole other kettle of fish. The rendering part is tough enough to get something really optimised but then you've also got to look at the cloud modelling system which is pretty tricky! Of course it'd be lovely to have but it's a pretty specialised thing in itself. Vray's main market as an archvis renderer first and foremost won't require those type of clouds for 99% of it's work and likewise vfx type renders won't use this stuff for most of it's work either. A nicer sky simulator would be well worth it for a lot of people's work however!

[Dmerc]

Ok , let's stay realistic.

But we are lately trying to use Environment Fog for atmosphere (Really?), and for this purpose the Sun/Sky seems not suitable. Why? Because atmosphere is already part of the Sun/Sky. You get twice haze and the sun seems to be too weak to penetrate the additional fog believable. Obviously we can tweak everything, yes. But some extra "high altitude" - setting would be lovely.

Best, Peter

[Dave_Wortley]

Vue as a product is good in theory, but the application has horrible tendencies to just not respond to the way of thinking of the artist. The Sky/Cloud model requires playing with values until you get what you want rather than any logical way. If someone asks you to make the sky a bit bluer you need to adjust haze properties etc. and doing this then affects something else, constant game or chasing tales with Vue.

It would be nice to have something of VRay's quality with Chaosgroup's amazing customer support and ability to listen to their users and implement features! I wrote a 12 page email to Vue 4 years ago telling them what we needed as a production studio to make Vue more usable, and these are things which would apply to many many other studios and artists and last time I checked not one of them ever got actioned.

Sometimes you want to be able to control exactly where the sun is, get the right reflections and lighting, and it would be great to do this from all inside of max. Stock HDRI's cost a fortune and most of the time we only want the sky.

What if you want to do a time-lapse animation going from day to night with cloud animations, possible with Vue, but it's a nightmare! Trust me I've done it!
http://www.taylorjames.com/infiniti-360?thumb=6210

Needed a pretty horrible pipeline in the end!

[joconnell]

I hear you Dave. I got a license of vue 3 or 5 back in 2006 and I couldn't get access to their forums or support before purchasing to make a decision. When I bought and got a password to the forum, it was nothing but posts from people complaining about how bad vue is . Helios for vus looks great but as you say the program it's based on is pretty nasty. I must give terragen 3 a go, a lot of people seem to use it as a production solution.

I'd also agree on having anything made by a company with a similar ethos to chaos. Only thinkbox and ssontech that make syntheyes come close for the programs I use.

[trixian]

Some type of sky editor a'la HDR studio would be perfect.
Lat-Long,3d dome view etc. where you play with large gradients of float colour. Adding layers for cloud images, setting max min range for intensities, oh how I wish.
Integrated into max with realtime update for RT windows maybe...
Anyone?