I'm curious, I see all these beautiful cloud renders but I don't see any shadows on the ground/water/terrains cast by the clouds.....Why is  this?  I've seen a render similiar at another website where the sky was covered by clouds but the ground was bright & so was the terrain...no cloud shadows being cast whatsoever. 

Why is this?

Attached Link: Displacement textures Sheet 2

Forester: Beautiful scenes - can't wait for the release of your new ship model - looks very cool, especially the sails!

Eisbaerchen: Care to elaborate on exactly which parts you used displacement - i like it a great deal    :o)

Wow  Sacada, those are amazingly cool! Thank you so very much for sharing them.   When I see these displacements in action my mind soars with so many possibilities! :)

Just had a vision of the future trying to explain to my kids:  "When I was your age we didn't have fandangled displace-ama-call-its.  We had bumpmaps and we loved it! " :)
 

I also want to know why the clouds are not casting shadows.
 A member on my forum posted a pic and it dint have any shadows either. :)

The above image is with the cloud shadow at 70%.
The below image is with the cloud shadow at 2%

...one notices that the shadows don't apprently line up... is there a way to FOCUS the shadows to project down a finer group of more accurate cloud shadows?

...and I would assume---- turning on cloud shadows increases render times?

Re the shadows not lining up -- where is the sun in the pic?  That could affect the alignment.

The shadows do line up. Here is an image taken from above. I have added a couple of spheres and volumetric light so you can see the projection of the sphere objects. The sun is low at 159 degrees pitch (180 degrees is on the horizon).

From this image, you can see the cloud next to the left hand sphere and the shadow of that cloud on the ground also next to the shadow of the sphere.

That's funny Scott - i just made a similar scene for the same reason! But without the cute spheres treatment. It does show the difference when you set cloud detail to 100% (notice all the cloud detail at the edges)

...so I guess then if you wanted nice, relatively focussed cloud shadows, you would put the sun around 12 NOON and you would see lots of dappled-gray cloud shadows all over your terrain?

That would be exciting to see...

Also- what KIND of clouds are these-in the V6i Pantheon of Clouds?  Sky-Plane clouds, Object clouds- etc (whatever they are called by V6)..and do they ALL behave like this- same cloud shadow effect- or does this only work with certain types of clouds, atmospheres, etc...

There are two kinds of new , more realistic, clouds in Vue 6. - cloud layers from a spectral atmosphere - cloud objects Both can only exist in spectral atmospheres. Cloud objects behave like cloud layers, except that they are made from a small group of spheres. They can be individually placed, resized and oriented.

...Thanks, Agiel for that info!

@ jc: the ground has displacement-mats and the snake too...maybe the depth of the foreground-mat is not high enough....

All in all, I think the improvement in bringing in Poser characters is about a zillion percent!

I have not tried to keep them Posable yet, but if I understand correctly the import options, it sounds like they can stay posable too if setup right.

Good to see that about the clouds :) Thanks for that :)

Some Godrays

Mazak

Mazak

Ah! Godrays! Excellent work Mazak! Godrays seem to be difficult to get from scratch, but i think i've figured it out. Will try to do a quick tutorial soon.

Oh cool lingrif, can you please post a picture how it looks without the Poser material?

@jc thx

Mazak

i take back anything i may have implied about not getting my serial number - it was totally my fault for not seeing the invoice page link - anyhow early indications on my system are that this will be used A LOT - I have been in a C4D haze for many months now and did not even install Vue5I on my new computer last week - i think i am back to vue, certainly for ANYTHING outdoors as i cannot seem to make C4D behave outdoors to save my life - thank you to agiel and this forum for all they have provided now and over the years to our efforts and our community

Pretty godrays Mazak; thanks for the demo! :)

This is the bunny imported into Vue without the Poser link (not using Poser materials).  Big difference.

Wow that is really a surprise, the Poser materials works so good
**
**@attileus thx too

Mazak

Makes the three days of waiting for the download worth it.

<jedi-mind-trick>These aren't the droids you're looking for.</jedi-mind-trick>

...Yes those GOD RAYS are cool stuff, reminds me of a best selling poster photograph around 10-15 years ago, which featured some inspirational words about having faith... I can see now that with V6i you could now recreate that poster pretty nicely...!

Literally 30 minutes into Vue 6 Infinite. Clouds and spectral atmosphere are nice. This render took 3.5 hours (!) on a 1.67GHz G4. The top half of the image took about 80% of the render time.

Attached Link: art.sacada.net

This allows you to do ecopainting type functionality but with complete and simple control.

Here is an example where the police have been copied. No need for an eco-system.
Police Maze

If I load a simple terrain, and apply a ecosystem with tree and plants in it, when I render it, shouldn't I see trees and plants?

Here's what I got doing it with the country town ecosystem

Is there an option I missed turning on from default?

Did you open the ecosystem material and click on 'populate' ?

No, I just applied the ecosystem as a material.

 From reading the manula, it says when you apply n ecosystem material it will automatically populate the object.

I am still getting the prv open error popup, with the option to hunt for it. The requester that opens only allows you to see image type files, not the prv file its actually looking for.

A reinstall of vu6 didn;t change things at all... it keeps looking for those plant prv files in the environment folder.

Dynamic Teddy Hair! >8o)

hclbaumbach@ amazing cloudscape there! :-)

And a fun caustics test:

All That Glitters...

8op

Outstanding work Trelawney! The dynamic hair & those gemstones are superb :thumbupboth:

Did that dynamic hair come out of Poser?

Very cool Sacada - that is a very useful feature :)

Dynamic cloth import  works well too:

Welsh Flag

A bit esoteric - just trying out multiple dynamic cloth imports, mixed P6 and V6 shaders, function editor testing foamy water, breeze and alpha compositing features.

(Rendered @ Final Quality and compressed with DivX)

Another excellant animation :)

Attached Link: Cloud Scene

Thanks. I labored for hours in the hot sun, painting each stroke with a single horse hair. :) Vue 6 makes it pretty darn easy. Here's the scene.

Trelawney that's Amazing!! :woot:

Mazak

Thanks Debby & Mazak!

Yes that was Poser imported hair - so much nicer than V5 but the hair is self-shadowed so V6 strand hair looks more solid when imported than the way Poser does it, so you may have to tweak to compensate a little.

Originally I used the Poser shader but I found a neat trick that if I used a more transparent material, the hair looked 'softer'.

This may make you chuckle - I used the "Milk" material to get this effect - and I think it looks nicer (and more cuddly) than the original Poser render.

I knew milk was meant to be good for you - but this is even better! >8op

Re-working some old V5I scenes can really add life to them too:

The milk effect :blink: :lol: very creative to even think of that :) From what I'm seeing the lighting in V6I is vastly improved - very realistic - which is a good thing  of course :)

In my opinion it was the right decision by e-on to pre-release Vue6. More people can explore more crazy things, with this excellent piece of software.

Good Night!

Mazak

Agiel:Manual propagating worked fine.

I'm still getting those weird pvr errors, but I'm getting better results now. Thanks!

Those new render examples are killer guys! I'm not having such good luck importing a poser matierial as you are though.

Garee I just used the default settings to import my Poser mermaid and she worked out fine as far as material settings went.

I just read in another thread my installer download was much smaller then someone else's. I'm trying to download again now.

Get THIS! 1st part just downloaded in about 25 seconds! Second part in about the same timeframe!

 BTW, just posted another thread with a bad poser material conversion, using the default settings as well.