Does anybody know how to recreate Mental Ray physical sky with aerial perspective “visibility distance” in VRAY?
In Mental ray the physical sky is connected to a lens shader.
Im not sure what that is, do you mean atmospheric fog? You can us simple environment fog for this effect I think it should do what you need.
It’s not just simple fog…fog is just white fog…Aerial perspective in Mental Ray or Vue is an atmospheric condition…like when you look in
the far distance the shadows tend to turn blue because of the particles in the air, or warm tones if it is towards sunset…if i use any kind of fog it will just turn whatever is distant from camera into grey shadows.
I’m attaching 2 renders here from Mental ray…as I lower the sun in Maya, the physical sun adjusts the right colors of the atmosphere to mimic the real world, it’s actually coloring the atmosphere according to the sun position…I’ve tried environment Fog in Vray…it’s great, but it is just fog after all.
Maybe there’s a way by using a Vray Physical camera combined with Vray physical sky and sun…I just don’t know the trick…but I must say even though Mental Ray sucks I still love this feature quite a lot.
It is not a real volumetric effect like in Vue where you can achieve God rays thru the atmosphere but is the closest thing with a decent render time.
Thanks .
This is on the “to do” list.
Best regards,
Vlado
To me it’s the best news I ever heard Vlado, if this happens in the near future it would be awesome , it’s just what’s missing for a perfect Physical Sun and Sky system.( I could then drop MR for good)
I’ll keep my fingers crossed and thank you.
i second this request! 
yeah here too …
Has this been resolved?
I really need to find out how to get a distance haze look when using the dome light or sun/sky.
There are a few things planned according to Vlado - Google Workspace Updates: New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents
Ok. Is it possible to achieve this look using, say, environment fog?
I have a scene that is 20km across and I would like some distance haze. Can I achieve this using environment fog? If so, can somebody provide a tutorial on how to do it?
Yep you can - with environment fog the thing you want to look out for is distance, density and step size. Distance is how many units it takes for the fog to build up to full strength, so in 3dsmax where we use real world units, if I had a fog distance of 100 metres, objects 100 metres away from the camera would be totally covered in the fog. if you set it to 200 metres, the object 100 metres away would only have 50% opacity fog over it. It’s pretty much how quickly the fog effect builds up. Density is how thick or see through it is overall, so it’s like a master opacity for the effect. Step size has got to do with the quality of the fog. How it works is vray will fire a ray through the fog and take a measurement at set distances. Again say if you have a box full of fog that’s 100 units long. A step size of 10 means that vray will fire a ray into the fog, stop 10 units into the fog, measure how much fog has built and store it. It’ll travel another 10 units in, take another measurement of the fog and add it to the previous amount. It does this all the way through. So if you’ve got a fog box of 100 units long and a step size of 10, vray stops 10 times along the way to measure your fog. Lets say that you decide that you want to break up the fog and put in a noise texture. If vray is only taking ten steps of detail through your entire fog box, it might not be fine enough to see all the nice detail in the fog. Here you’d have to make your step size smaller so it’s stopping more frequently to see how the fog is building up and capture more of your noise texture. It’ll be slower since it’s taking in more detail but it’ll look better. For a simple overall fog you can try and use much larger step sizes at the start and gradually bring the number down to find a nice balance of speed versus quality.
Now we have VRayAerialPerspective atmospheric plugin which can be used to create haze effect. The feature is available in the latest V-Ray beta release.
That’s great xmas gift Zdravko, thank all the Chaos team for that, I should run some tests soon…thank you very much.
sorry - how do we test this?
last two builds (the ones from December) there doesn’t seem to be anything to VRayAerialPerspective in V-Ray > Create from V-Ray Plugin > Volume. I’m probably looking in the wrong spot. Couldn’t find the new sky model either to test.
Maya 2016+SP4
It’s only in the 3.15 nightly builds. It’s also registered as a volumetric in Maya itself.
Thanks, how do I get to the nightly build page…under my downloads I only see the official July release Maya 3.10.1…how do I see 3.15?
You can write to support@chaosgroup.com and ask for the aerial perspective, or you can write to me at vlado@chaosgroup.com
Best regards,
Vlado
Did a few tests this morning. Looks pretty sweet Chaos Group!
One problem though that stopped any further tests is that the light cache went from 1 minute of the stable builds to (at least an hour - over lunch) when lots of VRayAreaLights lights were involved. Had to go back to the stable builds as my test scene couldn’t render.
Any images you could share Snivlem.?..I havent strated my tests yet.
I’m afraid I didn’t save anything (they were using existing scenes) and only region renders.
I was interested to see how it would cope with being somewhat of a replacement for VRayEnvironmentFog which is sometimes quite slow with lots of lights in my little opinion anyway.