Just some quick tests of volumetric lighting and materials... This first one is a flower I made in Rhino, not very accurate but over time it will get cleaner. The volumetric quality is set to 32, a heppy medium with few artifacts but a decent render speed...

And the material test... a variation of one of VanLippe's sky materials, this was just a way for me to define how the quality slider works in the Material Lab. This image's cloud sphere has a render quality of 0.

Same scene, the cloud material Quality is set to 25 this time. You can see clouds.

And here it is at 50...

And at 75...

And lastly, at 100. This one of course, took hours to render. I think in this case I prefer the clouds at 50, what does everyone else think? Nothing too exciting, but I'm not sure I've seen too many volumetric tests. Takes too much render time away from better tasks...

Yup, I ususally don't go higher than 65, at most. All depends on the mat and the scene also, but still. AS

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I do like the borealis-esque effect of the 50.

I concur: 50 looks a lot more natural than 100

Okay, I'm going to be a real novice here: Skay material? Render quality? I'm so sorry, but I love working with the sky and I'm wondering how this was done. Is it a material on like a sphere set in the sky? I haven't played too much with the sky yet. I just get lost working in the DTE for the clouds and stuff. If anyone cares to enlighten me a little I would appreciate it. :)

~Damia~ LeviathanPhotography

Oh, and I like it at 50 also. And that flower with the lighting is great. Can't wait to see more of it if you are still working on it. :)

~Damia~ LeviathanPhotography

Aye, Damia, some quick answers... For one, I try not to se the Skylab clouds any more. I feel like I've done everything with them possible, even after playing with Alvin's kickass skies I still want to explore new stuff. In this scene (the mountain/cloud scene) I used a huge sphere surrounding the scene, and a volumetric material which I tweaked heavily from one of VanLippe's cloud materials... So, the scene actually has an atmosphere. If I turned the density on the Volume material up to 100, the scene would be completely white, or damn close. Volumetric materials offer more flexibility both in the material itself, and in the shading modes. I'll post a screenshot of the scene and the cloud material I used, if you're interested. But, to sum it up, Volumetric materials have a Quality vs. Render Time slider. The lower the value on this slider, the faster it will render, but at an obvious quality hit. These images (except the flower) were all tests of how the clouds would look if I let it render longer, basically...

Oka,y they weren't very QUICK answers, sorry...

I don't mind long answers. I just said quick so I wouldn't seem to be a nuisance. :) I love skies and fog and whatnot but I haven't played with it much yet. I would love to see a screenshot if it isn't too much trouble. I will have to try that out. Now where do you change the material quality? I don't have Bryce open right now so I aplogize if it is obvious while in the program. Thank you for the response. I can't wait to try it! :)

~Damia~ LeviathanPhotography