eonite opened this issue on Nov 03, 2009 · 302 posts
eonite posted Wed, 04 November 2009 at 9:19 AM
synergy543:Thanks! I am not experienced with populating scenes so I cant really tell. But I have heard that populating an Infinite Terrain can increase render times tremendously. One solution would be to restrict the population to an area which does not extend to far away from the camera. As unpopulated terrains (real world dimensions, procedural) is concerned, I found that the rendertimes are acceptable. I dont think they are much higher than with smaller terrains, but you get the benefit of having real world dimensions, which of course can increase realism.
As for AP settings I don`t have an example at hand right now. One important thing to know about
Aerial Perspective is that with an AP setting of 1 the atmosphere is calculated in real world dimensions. This means that if you have a cloud layer that appears at an altitude of 1km (The Altitude parameter in the cloud editor) this layer is treated exactly like that.
If you keep the layer at 1 km but you set the AP to 10, the layer is treated as if it was at an altitude of 10km! This means in practice that it will probably be too bright and not be colored correctly.
The same is true for terrains. Lets say you have a terrain that is only 1 square kilometer large.
It should represent the whole landscape.
If the AP is set to 1, the terrain will be treated as 1 square kilometer terrain, so it will look kind of unreal because you don`t get the haze and fog to influence it correctly. So in a way it will always look like a 1 square kilometer terrain. However if you set the AP to 10, the terrain will more look like a 10 square kilometer terrain.
The Aerial Perspective is,, as I understand it, an option to rescale the whole atmosphere, which is certainly useful, if you have a small terrain that should represent a larger landscape.
However it seems to me that it`s often used as a regular parameter, just like the other atmosphere parameters. I mean you can use it like that, but you may end up with a terrible mismatch between atmosphere and terrain.
My opinion on AP is:
Either you don`t care about realism and use th AP slider freely. Or you care about realism and then you need to be fully concsious about the fact, that it will rescale the atmosphere.
I personally try to avoid this by always using an AP setting of 1 and use real world dimensions for terrains. (1 meter in the real world will correspond to 1 meter in the Vue world).
In the Vue atmosphere folder there is a subfolder called "Physical" or something. This subfolder contains atmospheres which come close to the real world, and all of them have an AP set to 1.
I was amazed to see that if you are selecting one of these "Physical" atmospheres and load cloud layers with clouds in real world dimension you get stunningly realistic results. This was the reason why I decided to create cloud layers which correspond to an AP setting of 1.
Gill: I understand that you can create special effects or that you can make the atmo match with a small terrain by using other AP settings than 1.
Daniel1705: No, you cannot influence the shape of the detail that are coming from the cloud model. But you can set the details amount to 0 and use details created in the FE instead ( or you can mix them).
Not sure what you mean by "density profile". There is the "custom cloud layer profile". This is a filter that defines the VERTICAL profile of the clouds and has nothing to do with where the clouds will appear.
But you can define areas in the FE which control where the clouds will appear. In theory you could go much further and define the shapes, areas and the details of the clouds by using the FE. However, as I said earlier, this can increase render times enormeously.
Thats why I was trying to find a good compromise between realism and render times. So I came up with a system of "lightweight" metanodes, which wont have too much of an influence on the rendertimes, all while allowing for a maximum control over your cloud layers.
My concept is to have a good combination of the Vue cloud model(s) and a system of Metanodes, which will complement each other.