Stonemasons new cloud product
Ruphuss
Posts: 2,631
in The Commons
any experience or some renders please
and no jokes about the daz cloud hehe.....
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Comments
/sigh
I'm VERY curious how that was pulled off.
they appear is if they could be volumetric clouds but not the kind you can reshape, just presets. either way 1) they are from stonemason and he has always put out excellent content and 2) they look cool as **** and I may have to rethink my reluctance on Iray even if I have to CPU render those things.
I'm curious as well.
It's one of the observations I made a while ago that the best way to have 'complex' clouds and fog, lacking the ability to procedurally generate thick and thin bits like 3DL, is with the actual shape of clouds. Unfortunately, given how funky displacement works in Iray, that's a route denied.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a lumpy shape with a corresponding glossy (or refraction) color map to help accentuate peaks and valleys.
hi guys,each cloud is made from groups of textured billboards,roughly 3d in shape,I recommend you always face the groups toward the camera,
these are not volumetric clouds,and also dont look that great in 3delight so they are Iray only,I also recommend adjusting translucency to get some nice lighting effects.
enjoy :)
S
By "not that great" do you mean terrible, or just serviceable? :)
My current preferred technique is to render in 3DL (I like the colors/textures better, since I don't want photoreal) and then Iray (for the better lighting and shading) and then play with layering them in GIMP until I like what I've got.
Is that a viable - if not optimal - option here?
well,they looked bad to me(too much shadowing),others may think they look fine,but given the amount of layered transparency being used I didn't really bother looking into it,
Understandable. Thanks.
They look awesome, Stonemason, and thanks for popping in. :)
Which shader where you using?
If you used the omnifreaker Ubersurface you would be able to override the occlusion and clear up some of the interactions between the billboards. Setting that override pretty high helps a lot with layered transparencies.
wow...talk about honesty! I do a lot of volumetric atmospheric stuff in other rendering programs...they are all very processor intensive and only Arnold can give you foggy atmosphere at a decent pace. However, the advantage of billboard is a reasonable render time and fair flexibility (especially if you know some tricks in Iray). I know that Stonemason has never turned out a product that is shoddy and that's why I believe that this cloud system can have some uses for me....(heading over to the cloud counter to buy).
Essentail for setting up shadows on stuff in scene to me. Cuts down on my post work time
Between gtis and kit bashing all the cool stuff he's done, (just added section 4 to my sci-fi modulars), I'm spending another weekend saving stuff.
Is there something in the climate the makes you kiwis so creative, or should I just be glad you don't live where you're not so inclined to be detail oriented? It's the fact your not in Oz, isn't it?
If anybody is looking for clouds to render in 3Delight, I often use the cloud billboards from Winter Terrains http://www.daz3d.com/winter-terrains-for-daz-studio.
I'm not familiar with the concept of billboards (in DS, obviously I know what they are in rl) - can anyone explain whats meant by this please?
A billboard in 3d land is a flat plane (or group of ) set up with a diffuse texture and an alpha (transparency) map to provide a simple, quick to render 'cardboard cutout' of an item. Often used for plants and crowds.
Thanks mjc1016
Wow, thats what those clouds are made up of? Thats impressive. They totally look like volumetric clouds.
With stacking varied sizes you can do 'volumes' pretty convincingly. Think of it as making a statue out of a stack of cardboard cutouts....
On the one hand, you have to be careful about orientation, lighting, and shadows.
On the other hand, it is _insanely_ hard to get volumetric clouds to render even sort of well, and frequently the detail is unsatisfying for an extremely long render.
For example, this: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/City-in-the-Clouds-579617111 took maybe 6 hours of experimentation to finally work out, and another few hours of rendering before I decided 'eh, grainy looks good.'
The effect only works in a very limited way (specifically, the light source has to be in front of the camera), and the clouds look very flowy, rather than the crinkly detailed puffs I was really trying to capture. It ended up looking good, but... consider the foreground, generated clouds. Then consider the painted skydome behind it, which looks very intricately detailed and cool.
Yeah, billboards are sometimes the best way to go.
Stonemason, this is another home run! Thank you! :)
Stonemason's cloud.....the advantage of apparent volume without the intensive Volumetric processing...recommended.
I have over a third of Stefan's store so this one is definitely high on this weekend's shopping list.
Cheers,
Alex.
I'd be really curious to hear of folks' experiences making use of this. My experience with billboards is that they can be tricky to use, particularly in Iray...
I've used other clouds by Stonemason from Winter Terrains on a few renders in Iray and have used them as blown snow in one and sea spray in ths one :)
Does this product work in DS 4.8 or just DS 4.9 ? If it works in 4.8 I will buy :) as soon as I get a difinitive answer.
I notice that a few of the promo renders look a bit 'grainy', as if Iray hadn't finished working on them.
Would I be right in thinking that these guys take a while to render? The less grainy ones look gorgeous, so I don't mind waiting, but I'd just like to know what to expect.
they seem to work fine in DS.4.8
they render pretty fast for me,the grainier renders are just where I went overkill and added too many ,the wireframe view of those scenes were almost black because of the amount of layers
it was actualy people recommending those winter terrain planes that spurred me into doing these new clouds ,I wanted people using something that looked a little better than those single poly clouds,these ones will work much better with the lighting in Iray, in particular when using sun/sky.
yea I'm familiar with turning off occlusion but in doing that things just begin to look a bit flat.