Hi
I’m new here. Just wanted to share a few tests I made with the new EnvFog SP3 feature. I have a few feature requests as well, but I’ll make a seperate thread for those in the appropriate forum. 
Note: I did some corrections in AE - so they’re not straight from the renderer. Primarily adjustments on levels, curves and a bit of glow on the last one.
I love this feature. If only my computer weren’t so slow…
Those look fantastic!
I haven’t got time to play envfog much, but that looks promising.
Render times?
-LarsSon
Wow!
rendertimes?
Very cool! I have a couple requests of my own, so will keep my eye out for your thread!
Care to share the technique?
This is great - is this just created through vray 1.5 sp3?
Thank you!
Rendertime for image # 2 was 40 mins on my quad Q6600 (using only 3 cores as I was working on other stuff) and image # 3 was around 20 mins (also using 3 cores) using a bigger step rate - that introduces more noise.
Image # 1 is upscaled from about half res to fit the same AE comps - don’t remember the render time for that one.
Technique is fairly simple. I downloaded this example file from the EnvFog examples page and modified it. For image 1 and 3 I used Perlin Marble (also great for Afterburn Combustion). Image 2 uses Blur’s “Electric” noise map with an altered curve. All three images use a huge box gizmo with the camera placed inside of it, and only one light source. Image 1 + 2 uses a Spot light with vrayshadows - Image 3 is an Omni light also with Vrayshadows. All images uses the GI setup that came with the example file - although with slightly modified settings.
And like I said - a bit of post production was done on them all. I can up the clean images later tonight. Apart from the Blur Electric map there’s nothing but standard max and VraySP3.
All good but that second one is fantastic. Nice one
Image 2 and 3 without any post work done on them:
I’m doing some animation tests and ran into an obvious problem when animating the light source. GI flickering enmasse. Perhaps someone would give me a few pointers for getting a stable solution for animation - without just cranking everything beyond up. Perhaps the irradiance prepass/rendering option? Any GI animation experts out there?
Around 10mins per frame on this - on a dual quadcore nehalem 2.26ghz
I used irradiance map as primary and light cache for secondary. Irridiance was set to single frame on a low setting - which was obviously a mistake…
Funny. Last night I tried to recreate this scene and I also tried to run an animation. I’ve got the same problem - lots of flickering. I believe I had set it up as lightcache for both primary and secondary pass. I’m not sure why I had it set like this, but for stills it seemed to run faster. I’ll try some other settings and let you know if I stumble on a solution…
what is you workstation??? You have nehalem inside !!!
Very interesting work that’s look like smoke…
rfellers: Sounds great (that you’re looking for a solution) - I’m testing with animation pre/render pass now to see how much that will help.
raistlin: In a moment of insanity, I bought one of the new Mac Pro workstations and installed Vista64 on it.
really cool renders Henrik, might try something like this myself!
Very nice! Thanks for sharing your Technique.
I think I figured out the animation thing. I set both primary and secondary to light cache, upped the subdivisions to 2000, set the scale to world (I left the sample size at .02 - my gizmo is sphere with an 8 unit radius) and the mode to fly-through w/ auto-save on. Once the light cache was calc’ed, I set the mode to ‘from file’ and loaded the vrlmap. The light cache took about 15 minutes to calculate. Frames took about 6 minutes. I’m running this on a quad xeon 2.83ghz w/4 GB ram running XP, 64-bit, Max 2008.
http://www.ryanfellers.com/pub/Atmos.mov
HenrikBC - Thanks for the post!
rfellers: Looks stable - cool.
But my problem is with animating moving stuff. I believe irradiance+light cache provides stable solutions as well - for flythough animations when precalculated in that mode.
This one vray_volfog_03b_h264 has the light source moving towards the left (cancelled further frames due to impatience). I ran multiple tests yesterday to no avail. Right now I’m trying brute force for primary and none for secondary. 30 mins per frame in 640x267… so not really usable, but if it gives me a stable solution then at least I’m that “far”.
I had originally tried animating the phase of the texture, but gave up on that and decided to just get the static scene working and then go from there. I had explored the brute force approach, but when everything is animated (lights, texture, camera) I think the step size (in the vrayfog setup) also has to be extremely small to keep the lighting from jumping around. When I get some free time I will experiment more with this.
This images and animations are so damned cool - I love it when 3d gets away from the shiny and into the murky world of the organic like this - can’t wait to do some of me own inner space / blood testing - great !
Very nice animation!