It’s time for a new playground, this time regarding the new Improved Sky - Altitude & Haze (Aerial Perspective). Please feel free to test this out and post your creations, If you have any questions, requests or critique regarding this feature please share them with us. The latest stable version of it can be found here: Dropbox - Error - Simplify your life
Basic details
Upon adding a Corona Sun & Sky, navigate to your slate material editor and paste or move your corona sky there. Within the Corona Sky Texmap, there is a section called Improved Model.
It is now possible to set your observer altitude in meters, higher values of this parameter will make the sky clearer and the horizon line less sharp. Next to altitude, you will find the Volume effect(haze), if true it enables a volumetric effect based on atmospheric settings from the current skymap. As expected, higher values of the Volume effect make the haze more dramatic/dense.
Can you explain what you mean by ‘Observer Altitude’, I would imagine the Observer is the camera height? But is this a real world altitude based on a physical sun/sky daylight system location, or is it altitude from 0,0,0 in the viewport etc etc
Or is it arbitary?
Or is it the altitude of the sun?
If it’s the suns Z Position from 0, could this value not be obtained automatically?
I might just be getting confused because of the units being in metres - isn’t altitude normally in ‘degrees’ above the horizon?
Edit: Okay so I just googled ‘Observer Altitude’ and got the following which would suggest it’s the angle/height of the sun?
“Definition of “altitude” The angle of a celestial object measured upwards from the observer’s horizon. Thus, an object on the horizon has an altitude of 0° and one directly overhead has an altitude of 90°. Negative values for the altitude mean that the object is below the horizon.”
Altitude as in your altitude when you’re in a plane, or on top of a mountain, or standing on a beach.
It’s set here independent of the camera height because no-one actually wants to create their scene 3,500 meters above the 3D host software ground plane - they want to create it on the ground plane, but then tell the sky “actually this whole scene is on top of a smallish mountain at 3,500 meters”.
Sure, think it was the word ‘observer’ that threw me
I’ve just set it to the Z value of my Corona Sun, seems to work ok.
Edit: Actually no it doesn’t. It looks much better with a realistic altitude of the real world location of my scene.
So the altitude is affecting the Volume effect/haze quite a lot. The tooltip for alttitude states ‘higher values give a clearer sky and less sharp horizon’ But the higher I increase that value, the more colours shift in the haze/textures towards unnatural and it feels that the volume effect gets slightly stronger. I’d have expected with a clearer sky, the effect of volume effect/haze would be less pronounced.
It’s probably just my understanding of what the settings are doing and affecting and how i’m interpreting the tooltips and adding them together.
Using RC3 and the green tint is gone. However it tints now the scene in purple.. especially visible in refractions. Even if you activate the effect, then turn down to 0 the scene is still affected/tinted in purple slightly.
The sun doesn’t have to be aligned with observer altitude in any way by the user.
Earth’s atmosphere changes over altitude. The higher you get, the darker the blue sky due to a thinner atmosphere and less scattering, the thinner the ground fog etc - this is what this parameter simulates as explained by TomG.
I haven’t installed the new version yet, but here goes my question:
Is the sun intensity reduced automatically when the sun gets closer to the horizon? I hope it does, because with the 6.1 that doesn’t happen and I manually need to lower the intensity with guess work based on the position of the sun.
EDIT: I know this might sound like a kid wanting more and more, but it would be great if that behavior happened with the sun
Just to add that the actual Intensity parameter doesn’t change, but the light color and intensity from the sun in the scene (at that Intensity setting) does indeed change, as in all the demo videos, tutorials, etc. You could share an example scene and result if you are not getting that effect.
Sorry. You’re both right.
I guess I usually feel that artistically looks better with an even dimmer sunlight and larger size, increasing the penumbra faster. But that’s my personal artistic choice I guess.
Thanks.
So what I was talking about is this.
See the photo attached please.
The skylight is still strong when the sun is low, but the sunlight is much dimmer. With corona sun and sky what I feel it happens is that both the sun and sky lights get dimmer together at the same rate
Probably the photo attached was an HDR, but still it looks closer to what the human eye would see.
I’m not expecting Aerial Perspective to give this result automatically, so you can disregard my “request”. I just wanted to clarify and explain why I always feel I need to change either the intensity of the sun or the sky.
Also frequently I use two skies: One for lighting and reflections and one for background. This is for the same thing. When the sun is low, the reflections of the sky and the skylight in general feel too low in comparison with the sun.
No it really does work correctly, I was surprised myself how well. The previous model didn’t (as good at all).
Of course, both get dimmer but not at same ratio which you can compare when you compensate exposure (and normalize it).
When comparing to photos or things you remember visually, you have to account for all the variables that happen. Dynamic range (of your eyes or camera), post-production, clouds in the sky, architecture & nature occluding and bouncing light, etc.
Right now, minus the existence of cloud simulation within the Sky model itself, it replicates the light almost exactly to reality.
Absolutely, so am I :- ). And photographers :- ). Like.. how popular did Sky Replacement “A.I” got in last year? There is Luminar,etc. so many apps. Even before that, EV filters, Polariser filters, Lens coating, etc.. it all contribute so vastly to how we perceive skies in photography.
In terms of light (&shadows) cast, until Sky models have Cloud simulation, you have to change all aspects (size, color, intensity) in artistic way to account for how sun would get diffused behind clouds. Or use HDRi.
I feel like in few years we’ll get to that point at as well. Tools like Terragen were always trying to integrate the Sky models in such way.
It’s not an interior effect tbh - for that, the full volumetric material (Global, or on an object) would be the correct solution. This one is definitely intended as the haze and aerial perspective seen across long distances while outdoors.
