Okey dokey! Here's my challenge. It's a little different from my original idea because we all seem to want to learn a little more about functions and skies... 1. pick one of the really wacky colorful atmospheres in vue. I suggest alien ballet, strange purple, strange red, or busy sepia aliens 2. you may (and should) change any FUNCTION that's used to make the sky. This is done by going to the cloud editor and doing "edit material" on each of the cloud layers. Then in the material editor click on the grey function ball and choose "load function." Load any function that you like and observe the results. Remember, the material uses functions for color, bump, and sometimes highlight, transparency, and underlying material. Edit every material in the sky editor and load functions for each of them. If you're feeling ambitious you can edit the functions instead! 3. You may (but don't have to) load different filters as well 4. you may NOT change color maps, whole materials, light color, fog, haze, etc or move the sun, or otherwise alter stuff that isn't function-related. 5. the goal here is to make your new sky look as different as possible from the original simply by messing with the functions. So render before and after pix and post them! Whoever creates the biggest difference between original and final atmospheres wins. 6. If you need help with changing functions, by all means ask for it because this isn't about who has the most technical skill. I'll be happy to post a full walkthru for anyone who isn't able to figure out the steps. ok, 2 weeks, GO! MaryCanary

Cool! You all heard the lady....Go!

This is the "busy sepia aliens" sky with a square grid function applied on the first cloud layer (to the color, trans, and bump functions) and a combo of a spiral funciton and the onion function on the 2d cloud layer....

Heh-heh...... I was playing around with it some last night, and I too had chosen the "Busy Sepia Aliens". I can't remember what it was that I had done because I wasjust trying random functions and bumping up the gain here and there, but I ended up with a version which looked almost the same as the original, but it had many more lines. I then got sidetracked by an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while, and believe it or not, whatever it was i learned during the "sepia" experiment brought me a little closer to getting what I wanted. I'll post a WIP pic in a little bit (so y'all can see I've been doing SOMETHING..LOL). I think this is going to be the thing that finally teaches me some function-type-stuff, and I hope to be able to add something to this "contest" soon, but as far as that goes, I'll probably wait until I have something that's "worthy". I wouldn't reallly say that the above pic would cut it as a sky is concerned, but it does look pretty cool. Can an atmosphere be saved as a .mat? Cheers, Mike

not a mat, an .atm! Just go to the atmosphere menu once you've got it like you want it and "save atmosphere!" And if you're learning functions because of this, then it's having the effect I hoped for--all right! My sky is really pretty horrible I think (and I should have antialiased!) but it illustrates the challenge ;)

Hi Mary, Yeah, yeah yeah...I know the difference between a .mat and a .atm. ;) I was thinking that it would be cool to be able to take the apearance of a sky such as above and use it as a material on something. But I guess you could just render it, save it as a bitmap and then use it as a material. Well, I never claimed to be the world's quickest thinker, now, did I? :P MIke PS And YES, your idea is a VERY good one for someone such as myself who is pretty much clueless as to functions. It usually takes me a while with any software before I start learning the more advanced things. I get the idea that the functions are the KEY to creating great and realistic Vue materials, and I most definitely plan on studying them in depth. :)

heyas; mike, yer manipulating materials of the cloud layers. just save the mat from there. (of course, you can only save one at a time, not both cloud layers as one mat.) :)

but you could make a new mat that has the 2 cloud materials saved as a mixed material...and you can change the mixing method to "layers" and then use a function to tell them how to layer...which is a whole other challenge. Using functions with mixed materials gives you all KINDS of crazy results.

Mm, I think I might try this one out also. Great challenge mary. :)

Hey, I've been kinda busy lately, as I'm sure alot of you are this time of year (still having some PC problems, too...), but I've been working on this one. I have to say, that messing around with the functions is something you could probably do for years without learning it all! Thanks, Mary....great idea, really...it really makes one think. :) Cheers, Mike

ok, I played with the functions a lot. I learned a lot from this challenge. Here I have the sky how it was originaly.

And this is how it looks after I changed the functions from the sky.

Wow Rynn, that looks great. It's a far improvement over the original. I've been working on this somewhat too, and I have to say--this is about the perfect exercise for learning about functions in atmospheres. Cheers, Mike

ugh! well, i'm having terrible luck. maybe i'm using the wrong skies, didn't use the sepia aliens. but i change the function on the cloud colours and bumps and trans things, and the sky still looks pretty much the same. even with different filters. i did learn an interesting trick, though.... that sky thing with the glowing lights... the material is an additive glow sorta deal, but it has an underlying material (with no transparency)... which makes the glow overlay the underlying material -- and since that is dark, it makes the additive colours really show up well. that trick could come in handy some day...

Bloodsong, start with a really weird sky or you're not going to see huge differences. Alternately, load a really wierd color map. The functions affect (1) the shape of the tranparency on the layers, so one cloudy one will look much like another but griddy ones look different (2) the distribution of colors from the color map, so a plain color map won't produce noticeable changes even with a strange function. Also try deleting extra cloud layers and see what you can do with just one. mary

Hey this is kinda off topic here, but since we're talking about functions, I discovered a neat trick to using the "Rough" bump function on glass materials. I was building a chandelier, and I couldn't get the glass to look right, so off I was, function-bound. I'm waiting for the picture to render right now, and it looks as though it's gonna take a while, because it's got point lights and and reflections and ambience galore all over it (I'd have tried to make that sound more 'artsy-worthy', but I don't know any French...). I'm gonna put this .vob in the Vue free stuff when I'm done with it. Well, it just doesn't look right if I don't have something to give away, now does it? BTW, If I'm using my own materials for this thing which are all alterations of Vue 3 materials, I won't need to include them with the model, will I? Cheers, Mike

heyas; oh, i didn't know you could change the colour map and stuff. i was only doing the functions and filters.

Well, you're not really allowed to change the color map but since you can't get it to work I'm making an exception for ya ;) I'll also make an exception to my rule of hassling americans who use english spelling... :)

Ok, I finally had to give up because I discovered that there simply seems to be no limit to what you can do by stacking function upon function. The atmosphere I started with was the "Purple Flare" (On the left), and I did not edit anything other than the functions. Mostly I stacked "water cress" over "Spiral", and I upped the amplitudes and used fractal bump productions--all that good stuff. I did so much, I can barely even remember what I did! Well, as a sky it's not terribly useful to say the least, but the idea after all, WAS to see how much different from the original we could get. I DID alter the color production, but added no new cloud layers at all. I wanted to start with a more or less drab atmosphere and see how much I could "de-drabify" it, basically. I learned *quite* a bit about functions from this exercise---very good, useful stuff, for that matter. Thanks for the great idea, Mary! ........................... Since we had all the holidays going on, I think I want to wait another week until announcing the next Vue Challenge, so if anyone wants to continue with this (please!) feel free. :) Cheers, Mike