This is what I stumbled upon while I was working on my Arcade pic. Maybe lots of you already know, but for me it was a revelation! :) I did a distance mask render because I wanted to have the possibility to apply a slight focus blur in Photoshop later (an idea that later I discarded) and, when I looked at the grayscale result it dawned on me: I could use it as a very transparent layer to add haze and fog, and this is what I did. My image was lacking that right bit of haze that helps so much to convey a sense of scale and this solved it pretty well. Just drop your distance mask render in a separate layer, play with transparency and you have instant haze & fog with complete control over the amount of the effect :) Stefano P.S.: I think this works better with "large" scenes (I mean very big ones: the bryce size of mine was about 12,000 BU square when looked from top view), but I'll experiment with smaller settings also and let you know.

Ah, yes. I had atmosphere off because it played too heavy with the lights, that's why I hadn't any haze in the pic (sorry, it seems I can't find the original bryce render). Working with atmosphere off is way faster, and the grayscale solved the problem. S.

Man...i've been all like "Gah, i can't get the right look" or something like..."Man, this looks like crap." Maybe this will fix it. Did you do this with textures off, or is this default distance mask? (never done a distance mask render.)

Default distance mask. And it's incredibly fast, too. At 1280x1024 took no more than a couple of minutes.

Bryce adapts the grey-values to the size of the scene, so the size of your objects shouldn't affect the usability of this feature. I used distance renders on some of my images for haze or some other effects. It's just about as fast as maskrenders, but it's still possible to slow it down. I made a tunnel with 15.800 primitives and it took more then 2 hours to make a distance render at 675x900.

you can also use this to create a nice and quick DOF effect

Whoa, RR, 15800?... it's the tunnel in the bground of your last posting? @Hepcat: yes, I made it because I wanted to use it for DOF, but then put aside the idea and instead used it only for hazing a bit the picture.

ahhhh, I missed that. Nice image by-the-way

A novel idea, will have to try this in future. Thanks for the pointer!

The DOF thing is actually in the manual :) @DC; Yes, that the tunnel I used for the background of my last posting.

I've only used distance mask once and I now forget what I did with it, but since you've brought it to my attention I think I'll go play with it again. 8) Catlin

Great technique Stefano, thanks!

You can use it to blend the varying color of sky's with the scene too. A bit like a multicolor haze. Just delete all the objects from your scene and render the sky of your image without clouds. Then add it as layer set to hard light or overlay or color, depending on what looks best and add the distance render of your full scene as mask to blend the strength. I used it on my "Flowering from the mist" image.