Heh that looks cool 
Although the procedural shape looks a bit odd (clouds don’t form such well defined separated blobs).
Best regards,
Vlado
Great work Tomasz! Would love to see some more shots of this, and maybe a tut for this like you did with the fruit pretty please?!?
Can you give us any details in the meantime of how long these took to render and what kind of system you rendered it on?
that’s really cool - is it all 3d?
I did some commercial stuff for IWC’s pilot watches using this technique. Will look for the images, I think I still have them somewhere.
Regards
Oliver
Thanks guys! Yes, all 3D and I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. Maybe it’s worth trying to simulate clouds with FumeFX or Phoenix. I don’t have any of them at the moment so it will wait.
I don’t remember the render time exactly, but it’s not very fast. Around 1.5 h for full HD. I did render it with 1 eye rays per pixel (min 1, max 4 adaptive dmc, with noise threshold at 1.0) and pushed the quality in V-Ray fog settings. I still have to experiment with making it faster somehow. I can do an making of if I will be sure that this could be successfully used in production.
Best regards.
Best clouds I know are those from Lumion, and those are realtime:
id agree lumion is great, and considering its realtime its amazing, and also the clouds have the most natural forms… but for rendering of realistic skies ozone/vue are better (but oh so slowww)
one annoying thing is you get much more atmospheric control in the full vue, despite ozone being their dedicated sky product. i guess they want you to buy the full vue.
We’ve just completed a commercial where i used environment fog for clouds, unfortunately it isn’t already released so i can’t show you how it turned out (maybe in a couple of weeks).
We had just one major shot, but clouds had a specific animation both lighting and animation wise so i ended up rendering a library of single frames clouds and then do some camera projections and deformation tricks in nuke.
I have to say the quality of the volume itself it’s really really good, scattering gi, etc but in max you’re somehow limited by the atmospheric “apparatus”, so for example i wasn’t able to cast volumetric lighting (aka godrays) at the same time of rendering clouds.
Here are single clouds frame i did and one still from the final comp.
Those are some really cool examples !
We used ozone for a shot in a film a while ago and for full frame, photo realistic (seriously, they looked amazing) clouds at 1080p, 1 1/2 hours a frame is ok in my book. It’s slow to test and get the look right, but we were passing right through them over a few hundred frames and it worked great.
Used it a couple of times since to render skydomes & cut the clouds out onto alpha objects, so it looks more 3d than a skydome in big aerial shots.
thats not a bad rendertime, was that using the full shizzle lighting and quality settings ( its been a few months since i played dont remember which options were the killers) - i was trying to do create an epic cumulus stack with a sunset illuminating it.. was way too limited artistic control and sloooooow… for me , the limitation of not being able to define custom cloud volumes in ozone was a deal breaker, you need the full Vue to manually place and shape clouds. otherwise youre stuck tweaking settings to try and get the shape you want. whilst squinting at the preview window/postage stamp.
id kill for the procedural cloud forms and light behaviour of ozone, in max, with a viewport preview (point cloud?) and the ability to use meshes to define cloud boundaries. that would be the one IMHO.
im not sure that vray env fog , even with the correct procedural generation, can match the realism of ozone, although im not sure whats missing. lets just say ive spent many many hours trying to get a decent cloud that has nice solidity and behaves like a cloud under the various lighting conditions.
in my opinion an ozone like cloud generator would be an awesome and obvious upgrade to the stock vraysky, which invariably cant be used for the final scene as its so flat.
Oh, yeah. after we did this job I tried to do a personal work with it and gave up so fast. If the clouds you need aren’t too specific - you just need cg clouds of some form and they dont need to do anything, it’s great.
Pretty cool:
Please Chaos-group, make another plugin specifically for clouds/atmospherics! Perhaps a large amount of the R&D that went into phoenix could be used?
At the moment the only real option for people is more 3rd party stuff like Ozone, which whilst it produces fantastic results I find it’s integration to be really, really clunky and difficult to get to grips with. I’d love the simplicity of being able to create a vray sun & sky and then just pull in a chaos group atmospherics plugin to do all the rest.
Yea I agree… quick way of adding large amount of clouds as well as having options to get down and dirty to shape them up and down would be amazing…
I think that as it would be great to have built in cloud plugin, I don’t think that it’s something Chaosgroup should focus on. If there is any way to improve performance / add some features to VRayEnvironmentFog that should be the way to go.
I am pretty sure that I could get some very decent clouds using procedural maps inside 3ds max, but at the moment render times are a bit steep for animation.
Few thoughts:
- I feel that current model doesn’t work well with adaptive DMC. I feel it’s very often oversampling it.
- Maybe there is an way to improve performance with some way of baking fog data, adding different sampling method or adjusting existing one (steps based on distance from camera?).
This! I would instantly buy it if it was less then $1000,-
I really don’t think the 3ds max procedurals lend themselves particuarly well to anything other than cumulus clouds without some extensive setup & testing, which itself is very time consuming. Plus one of the most fiddly things at the moment is creating a gizmo several kilometres in size to encompass the clouds - otherwise they will come down to ground level - perhaps something that could be overcome by changing the “fog height” to a “minimum fog height” and “maximum fog height” rollout?
It would also be good to have a “fog height falloff distance”, so that it doesn’t abruptly begin or end at the specified height.
