Thanks, blaineak, Rutra and ArtPearl for giving me your opinion on Vue7/Vue8 compatibility.
I think that Rutra has made a clever suggestion by saying that it should be Vue7-compatible, with some additional files included for Vue 8.

blaineak: A section in the documentation will be devoted to aerial perspective.

As for locked Metanodes, I will keep them unlocked. Since I find that more and more users are getting acquainted/skilled with the FE, it makes sense to lock them.

Teruchan. I understand your concerns regarding terrains and AP=1 with all the (sometimes misleading) statements about AP settings. As mentioned earlier, I have no doubt that AP=1 is the best possible solution for (realistic) sky AND terrain illumination. Sooner or later we will see such pictures, which will amaze us all.
One of the Vue masters, Dax Pandhi, is supporting my approach, and he recently said that although he is using different AP settings for his work,  the best results are always achieved with AP=1.

There`s hope... :-)

Beautiful work, you've got yourself a customer there :). I'm not a vue expert, so I won't try and take a position in the current discussion, but since I always use real scale units when modeling (mental ray works a lot better that way) I also use real world units in vue so, I think your product will be perfectly adapted to my needs.

Quote - I think that Rutra has made a clever suggestion by saying that it should be Vue7-compatible, with some additional files included for Vue 8

My 2 cents......

Personally I think that's not such a good idea. I'd rather see two separate products if your going to support Vue 7.

I would much prefer that when I load your material up into Vue 8, everything I see is the best the program and you have to offer. I don't really like the idea of having backwards compatible material in there just to keep Vue 7 users happy under the same product.

To do that are your basically just coming to a compromise rather than offering the best you can for Vue 8 users. 

I'll buy it either way, but I felt I just had to let my opinion on this known.

Regards
James

 Thanks Abraham! Sounds like you are the perfect customer for this product :-)

Thank you Tubbritt for sharing your opinion. Food for thought...

Below I have added a picture file with a comparison between AP 1 and 10. The left column shows (small) renders  done with clouds designed for AP=1 and the right column shows what happens when you set the AP to 10. (AP=10 means that the atmosphere has a 10th of the thickness compared to AP=1)

I always thought an AP of 10 was 10x the density (meaning you get more haze etc.) rather than 1/10th (I thought that would be an AP of 0.1)

 FrankT:  the Vue manual says:

"Aerial perspective: This setting controls the overall "thickness" of the atmosphere. A value of 1 corresponds to the typical Earth atmosphere. If you increase this value, the effect, in terms of atmosphere, will be like increasing the scale of your scene.
In the preset atmospheres, this value is usually set to 10, so the effect of the atmosphere can be seen without having to use "real world" size environments. If you are looking for physical accuracy, you should reset this value to 1, which is the aerial perspective of the Earths atmosphere. You should also construct your environments at Earths scale (hundreds of miles)"

Maybe the term "thickness" is misleading. It does not mean "density" but rather "height".

I guess the reason why the haze appears to be denser is because, if you downscale the atmosphere by going from AP 1 to AP 10,  the same amount of dust particles are now squeezed into a much smaller space.

shows how long it's been since I looked at the Vue manual ! :biggrin:

Ok, eonite did it, I upgraded to Vue 8. The cloud lighting on his screens just looks too good.

I took into account all of chipp's and eonite's tips and tricks and submitted a render of the new Spectral Clouds 3 to my gallery.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1976702

Nonetheless I'm eagerly awaiting the clouds pack :-)

 A wise decision, Daniel1705! :thumbupboth:

Your picture looks beautiful! Well, worth the rendertime!

A question though. 33 hours...Do you think it was the clouds that took so long to render? I see your landscape is quite complex  and I guess it was considerably adding to the rendertime too. What was your render size setting?

Thanks :-)

The clouds took about 12-14 hours (so about half the time) with Godrays turned on and a quality boost of 0. I used Dave Burdick's tip and increased the object anti aliasing quality to 95 % to get rid of any noise. I already knew from past experiences that inceasing the Quality treshold increases the rendertime for several oders of magnitude, especially for very fine details like grass, but nontheless 20 hours with a Core i7 @ 3.6 Ghz for that bit of dynamic population is still too long in my opinion. Generally I find Vue 8 to render much slower than Vue 7, independent of the scene I load. All my old scenes, no matter if they have clouds or not, take about 1/3 more time compared to Vue 7 with the same custom render settings applied (and not the changed render presets in V8, I know their quality was increased so they take longer now). I hope this gets better with future updates.

And both the new displacement methods and the terrain editor are so far pretty much unusable for fine details, at least the software keeps crashing frequently on my PC due to very high demand of memory.

I rendered a scene three times: first using the Vue 8 OpenGL 2.1 setting, then the Hardware one and then Vue 7.5 OpenGL hardware, also. I was looking for memory start and finish and rendering times. I used a 1600 x 1200 format and User Render setting, low enough to do htis in a reasonable time, but not too low.

The times respectivally were 3hrs 35mins 37secs; 3hrs 35mins 4secs, and for the Vue 7.5 3hrs 25mins 33secs. These images were initially created in Vue 7.5 and then brought into Vue 8. Otherwise there would be no way to compare. Notice that there was little difference. The scene contained a lot of clouds and an ecosystem.

 Hi Paula,

The different Vue OpenGL settings would have zero impact on render times as Vue doesn't use OpenGL to do final rendering but rather to show the previews. So, no surprise there's no difference.

-C

 Thanks for testing this, Paula!

I cannot talk about rendering entire scenes, because most of the renders I did with Vue 8 so far were skies.
I also found that the render times (on skies) was not increased compared to Vue 7.

Regarding clouds there are several factor influencing render times besides the render settings and the atmosphere quality:

One of those factors is opacity.
The portions of the cloud layer that have full opacity/no opacity are rendering a lot faster than the parts with semi-transparency.
For example, if you have "massive" clouds with a sharp density falloff (especially when adding sharpness) they`re rendering relatively fast.
However, with a few exceptions, like some types of cumulus, this will make your clouds look less natural (although even the "sharpest" cumulus clouds still need a bit of softness, otherwise they tend to look too solid).
I mean, when you look at clouds in the real world, they most of the time have a very smooth density falloff. You can achieve this natural look in Vue too, however it will increase render times.

Daniel1705, it could very well be that one of the reasons why it took 10 hours or more to render your clouds was because you had this second layer with low density clouds.

Chipp -

I was using the different OpenGL settings to test resource usage. I just didn't note it here. It is part of the table I am putting together.

Also, people were complaining about much longer render times in Vue as well as some had resource problems so I did a number of tests. I knew OpenGL wouldn't affect render times, but the settings can affect resources.

Fantastic work & renders. Just wonderful.

• Lars

Quote - Chipp -

I was using the different OpenGL settings to test resource usage. I just didn't note it here. It is part of the table I am putting together.

Also, people were complaining about much longer render times in Vue as well as some had resource problems so I did a number of tests. I knew OpenGL wouldn't affect render times, but the settings can affect resources.

I have a ticked open with e-on on that.
The resources usage is 6 times higher with OpenGL2.1 turned and e-on are looking into this. From the reply I got so far it's clear to me that they don't see this as normal.

Regards
James

If you look at my earlier post in this thread. I did 3 tests renders:

I rendered a scene three times: first using the Vue 8 OpenGL 2.1 setting, then the Hardware one and then Vue 7.5 OpenGL hardware, also. I was looking for memory start and finish and rendering times. I used a 1600 x 1200 format and User Render setting, low enough to do htis in a reasonable time, but not too low.

The times respectivally were 3hrs 35mins 37secs; 3hrs 35mins 4secs, and for the Vue 7.5 3hrs 25mins 33secs. These images were initially created in Vue 7.5 and then brought into Vue 8. Otherwise there would be no way to compare. Notice that there was little difference. The scene contained a lot of clouds and an ecosystem.
RE: Resources Vue 8 OpenGL2.1 started at 85% ended at 83%
                             Vue 8 fixed harware pipeline  started at 90% ended at 88%
                              Vue 7.5 Hardware acceleratedstarted at 90% ended at 88%

I don't think this is 6 times higher. These were very controlled tests.

I'm not sure I understand the point of your tests at all. OpenGL will make no difference whatsoever to the time it takes to render an image.

Also by the look at your figures above something tells me that your scene was entirely empty of everything except for a sky. Is that correct ?

If so, that's not a real world test at all and you wouldn't have any clue of the true impact the OpenGL 2.1 places on your resources.

Regards
James

Thanks, Lars!

Have been talking about low density falloff earlier in order to get more realistic clouds.
Well here are some examples, which should illustrate what I mean.

Please have a little more patience. Things are progressing well, there will be an extended documentation on Vue clouds and several clouds/sky sets.
Trying to make things as easy and comprehensive as possible.

Really nice work eonite.

Regards
James

Beautiful! Can't wait.

Looking great!

Daniel, nice clouds in that render.

Thank you folks!  

Ooo I want those clouds !! They look very nice indeed

 eonite. Your work is amazing. Do you have msn? Or could you message me. I have a few things to ask about how you get your clouds like that.

Do you create your clouds manually? Or do you use the whole flowgraph or just the sliders?

My clouds always seem to look like smooth paintbrush marks in the sky. Not even nice and dense and fluffy. My clouds are ugly. I need help!

 Thank you, FrankT and eclipse245!

eclipse245: I am using both, the clouds editor and the function editor, Don`t know if you read this, I am still busy with my clouds project This includes an extended documentation on Vue cloud which will probably answer most of your questions.

Here is an update on my progress with the cloud project.

There will be several products available from C3D.

These are:

1. "CloudControl" is an in-depth discussion of Vue spectral clouds, and it will introduce a system of metanodes which allow for an unpreceded control over the distribution of clouds.
   The document will discuss all the relevant aspects regarding clouds, like distribution, density, detail etc. Also there will be many examples (of course including some Vue files.

2."CloudScapes" will be atmospheres/cloud layer sets. Those clouds are essentially what I have been developing over many months,  and you can be assured that they will differ in look and feel from the Vue presets. The included documentation will help you get more out of it. 

 Have tried to achieve a good compromise between realism and rendertime. As you probably know, the nodes in the function editor will inevitably slow down rendering. So I tried avoid using those nodes which put a too heavy load onto the computer.
 For example, if the cloud detail is provided by fractal nodes, rendering will be a lot slower than when you are using  detail from the cloud editor.
Why? Simply because clouds detail in the clouds editor is hard coded, as opposed to detail provided by the function editor. Therefore I have been trying work with the detail parameters of the clouds editor as much as possible.

I will try to keep the price of those products moderate, so everyone interested will have a chance to buy.

Looking forward to purchasing these. Thanks a lot for all your hard work and your contributions to vue.

Paula

Quote -  Thank you, FrankT and eclipse245!

eclipse245: I am using both, the clouds editor and the function editor, Don`t know if you read this, I am still busy with my clouds project This includes an extended documentation on Vue cloud which will probably answer most of your questions.

---

Here is an update on my progress with the cloud project.

There will be several products available from C3D.

These are:

1. "CloudControl" is an in-depth discussion of Vue spectral clouds, and it will introduce a system of metanodes which allow for an unpreceded control over the distribution of clouds.
   The document will discuss all the relevant aspects regarding clouds, like distribution, density, detail etc. Also there will be many examples (of cour

This is really good, having presets is nice but an companion tutorial on how it works makes it even better and I really think it's a good idea to have them both as separate products (even if I already know I will buy both. They are things, I just cannot resist and after seeing the renders you made and knowing it will actually give the same result with my renders (seldom happen because I do stick to the real world size). I'm already addicted to QuadSpinners product, I love Terrascape, I think I will love your products too.

Here's another one who's been keeping an eye on this tread and is seriously impressed wnd I'll be getting this cloud pack - I can't wait too!!!! : )

 Thanks, Paula, Abraham and cyberzen1 for your interest!

Sorry for not having been around for a while.

The products are finally complete and will be available shortly. The latest information I got from Cornucopia was that one of the products will be available by next friday the other one on New Year`s Day.

Here again the 2 completed products:

1. CloudControl is an in-depth discussion of Vue spectral clouds, and it will introduce a system of metanodes which allow for an unpreceded control over the distribution of clouds.
   The document will discuss all the relevant aspects regarding clouds, like distribution, density, detail etc. Also there will be many examples (of course including some Vue files.
   It will be compatible with Vue 7 and 8.

2."CloudScapes" Collection #1 is a set of 12 atmospheres/cloud layers. It`s a mix of various cloud types, reaching from towering cumulus to whispy cirrus clouds.
Will be for Vue 8 only.

Below are some preview pictures (the ones that will be shown at Cornucopia once the products have been released).

Fantastic! I'm sure it'll be a hit! :-)