I am still tweaking my underwater volcano shot and I am having a hard time getting the look right.
There are two issues:
1. I´ve between the “hottest” and “coldes” parts of the smoke is a very linear gradient lighting I don´t like. The volume is lit too evenl, which makes it look unnatural to me. I´m not sure which parameters to tweak here, to avoid this.
I´d first try to reduce the overall light emission, but I´m afraid then I don´t have enough brightness at the lower part of the smoke…Maybe thats fine and I can just add some more glow in post. I´m not sure, but maybe I´ve also reduced the grid reduction for the light too much?
2. I´m having trouble getting the smoke to appear whiter, without making it overall too bright.
I want something closer to this reference:
There is only a very narrow “hot” area, and then the smoke has a very bright look right after that.
When I´m just tweaking the smoke color, the overall glow from the light emission just gets too bright, and the contrast and thus all the details disappear.
Any ideas for that?
I just did a quick test and increasing the light resolution already helps a lot with getting more detail out of it.
Now I only need to figure out how to make the smoke brighter…
Light resolution was really low. If I use Phoenix lights, usually the resolution stays between 5-30%. But most situations nowadays I’m turning emit light off and let the vray gi do it’s magic. That way the details are well preserved.
For lighter smoke, I think you need more light to the scene. You can also increase external light scattering. At 2 it should look a lot lighter already.
Yeah, light resolution got rid of the “gradient” look. I remember turning it way down, since I had such a huge render impact from the light being cast on the scene and I was hoping to reduce it this way. In the end I turned off light emission on scene completely and just left it on for light on itself and just placed some more vray lights in the scene.
About the whiteness: I added more lights just including the smoke and that did the trick there. Bit of a balance there, to get it brighter without making it pop out of the scene too much. Its sometimes hard to tell whats what, if you don´t have enough reference and if you don´t know enough about the physical principles behind stuff…
