Hey folks.
I’m working on an animation and I’m trying to use fog to get some atmospheric perspective down this street. My trees are all proxied, and I was hoping they would look like less of a cluster with fog -- but to my surprise it doesn’t seem like they take the fog at all! Anyone know what gives?
explanation: the strip running across the middle has the fog far% at 5.0. while the top and bottom it’s at 2.5. Just to exagerate the problem.
Thanks guys.
Shaun
im not seeing any difference in fog between standard meshes and vray proxies.
Sorry Percy, the difference is subtle but everyone here in our office commented on it. I upped the fog to 20 for uber exageration. Actually, I kinda like it this way. 
more info -- these trees are collapsed & proxied onyx trees with vray mats.
Shaun
Im not saying there isn’t a disparity in your image. its pretty obvious…lol What Im saying is that I cant reproduce it.
Here is a test. Its a square tube. The left half is a vray proxy and the right is a Editable Poly.
I zoomed in and sampled the pixels and there is no difference where the two meet. I WILL tell you that the first time I tried this test, I couldn’t get fog working properly AT ALL, until I exited out of max and retried. Maybe your having a similiar issue? have you tried to recreate the problem in a fresh running max?
Hi ShaunDon,
Are all the Trees one single Proxy or all of them are separated… ?
Best Regards,
nikki Candelero
nikki -- good thought, I wouldn’t have considered that, but they are instanced copies of the same proxy. I’ll bet that’s the problem. Maybe if Vlado’s lurking he can confirm and suggest a fix, obviously percy proved proxies do take the fog, and I’ve inserted other proxies into the scene since posting to test as well with success.
Thanks for the hand, guys.
Shaun
Actually it is hard to say where exactly the problem is…
I have also made a simple test here
As You can see the fog is working ok, either on the single proxy column and on the multi-ones…
Best Regards,
nikki Candelero
question…are there transparencies on those trees? i havent tried in a long time but i remember max fog didnt work with transparencies
d’elf, there are transparencies -- the leaves are opacity mapped. The trunks do not, however they’re all in the same multi-sub mat, so perhaps it’s disregarding the whole thing?
Shaun
You guys ready for a curve ball? I distributive-rendered a frame with my workstation and one render node. The render node applied the fog to the trees, my workstation didn’t. What’s up with THAT?? *groans*
Shaun
Yeah, so, problem solved. DaftPunk sent me a pm suggestion which somehow I didn’t see till now to check off “Optimized atmospheric evaluation” -- I did and everything’s behaving again. Thanks again to all!
Shaun
I thought you had a good idea with the fog, so thought I’d give it a try, since I’ve been playing with Onyx again lately.
Looks good Scott, is that a standard off the shelf tree or one you made yourself. (Asking because I don’t recognize it from the standard collection)
I’m absolutely loving the Onyx software -- we bought it for this job, and honestly it’s the best $600 we ever spent! They so above and beyond every other plant system. While we’re on the topic, have you done any massive scenes with Onyx? I guess by massive I mean at least a couple million polys. Max gave out calculating the geometry at render, so I had to switch to using proxies, but that means no wind…
I started with a canned preset (don’t remember which), then changed the parameters quite a bit.
Just one tree, converted to vraymesh/proxy, then instanced about 20-30 times, and did a random rotate and scale. That’s what I love about Onyx - you don’t have to come up with 30 different trees.
Render time is awful high though, especially for a roughly 400x300 frame. But I do have reflection, refraction, area shadows, fog, etc. You think it could be lower? (about 7.5 million faces)
I almost asked for your leaf mat till I saw your render time. I’m afraid that would torpedo my animation. I’m trying to perfect my mats to get better highlights on the fly.
what did you guys get? the onyx guarden or onyx broadleaf
We got the Garden / Tree Storm bundle. So far I’ve only had cause to mess around with these Broadleafs, but I’m really digging it. I’m sure with some experimentation you can come up with some amazing foliage.